Patient deaths memorable to health care workers

Posted Feb. 28, 2022

By Nardin Ishak

Staff Reporter

Working in the healthcare field it is expected to experience a lot of sad circumstances that we often can't do anything about. I was at a Portland assisted living facility doing my hands-on training required portion for my Certified Nursing Assistant program when I experienced my first patient death. It is an experience most healthcare workers deal with on a daily basis. For me, it was new and very difficult.

I took my friend and we went up to ICF 2nd floor to check up on my hospice patient, Stan, after my instructor had mentioned he was deteriorating. His name wasn't on the door of his room anymore. ¨Is Stan not here?¨ my friend asked the floor CNA. ¨No. He passed yesterday or the day before,¨ replied the CNA mundanely. ¨We are short staffed today so it's good you guys are here to help,¨ she continued. She asked me if I wanted to help her get a patient off the toilet. I said no. ¨Are you sure? It's really easy!¨ My answer was still a no. I went to say Hi to Stan's roommate, a patient on the spectrum, but extremely cognitive and intelligent. We will call him James due to HIPPA violations. ¨What do you want?¨ asked James as soon as he saw me. ¨ It's my last day here so I came to say Hi,¨ I replied. ¨Oh, what do you mean?¨ asked James as he turned down his TV volume. I explained to him I was here training, doing my CNA1 clinicals, and I am all done. He seemed a bit sad, but he understood. I asked him what he thought of Stan not being there anymore. He wasn't very moved by his roommate's death, mostly upset that he accidentally found out about it. His roommate's body was taken out of the room after his passing without him knowing.

James pulled out a binder and said he wanted to make use of me for one last time. He pulled a paper out of the binder and handed it to me along with a pen. The paper had three names of people along with something next to it. He told me these were patients he had as roommates and they passed away and next to the name was the diagnosis. He was keeping track. The last name was Stan’s and next to it said Hospice, the treatment started when a disease is no longer treatable and is terminal. He told me to write ¨Author of ¨ and gave me two book names. Stan was an author who wrote and published two books in his fifties. Stan's wife gave James, the roommate, those two books for him to keep. I did as James asked me to and wrote down the names of the books. I started crying. I was overloaded and overwhelmed with emotions. I had become attached to Stan, even though he was non-verbal and couldn't communicate, and finding out that he was an author, who died of a brain inflammation, was extremely saddening to me. James continued on like I wasn't balling my eyes out in front of him. He steered the conversation away and told me I should go vegan, for maybe the 50th time since I met him, and wished me well in life. He thanked me for everything and said he had the pleasure of knowing me. I was touched, but still emotional. I left his room and went down to the empty chapel of the facility. I continued crying my eyes out as my friend tried to comfort me and tell me about her experience with death. ¨The first time is always hard,¨ she said.

According to my instructor, LPN, from my CNA-1 program, they get used to it. Some become desensitized, but the majority learn how to deal with it and overcome it. Talking it out is the most popular and effective strategy on dealing with death. Talking to someone who had similar experiences or works in the same profession is also recommended as they will be more understanding. Talking it out isn't as easy as it sounds and doesn't just miraculously make you feel better. Death is an experience that takes time to process, for some it's longer or shorter than others, but most go through the five stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. They could be experienced in this order, a different order, back and forth between stages, or staying in one stage longer than others.

Other healthcare professionals become desensitized or fear becoming that. It's a fear of mine too.

"Medical students are very aware they are undergoing a socialization process by which they become desensitized to the difficult things they see every day in the hospital. They realize this is necessary to control their emotions and focus on caring for the patients. On the other hand, they are very concerned about becoming insensitive to the spiritual, emotional and personal needs of the patient," said Mark Kuczewski, PhD, leader author and director of the Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics, in a Science Daily study.

According to Oxford Languages death is the action or fact of dying or being killed; the end of the life of a person or organism. The UDDA states: ¨An individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead.¨ Most religions believe that death is when the spirit separates from the physical body, while Buddhists see death occurring at a point after the invisible, subtle consciousness leaves the physical body. Christianity, Judaism and Islam beleive in Gods promise for life after death, the after life, while budhists beleive in reincarnation. Some christians also believe that a dead person's soul stays in a sleeping state until the Last Judgement day after the general resurrection when the sleeping souls will be assigned to eternal life or domination, heaven or hell. I don't know what Stan believed, what he experienced, or if he was in pain in his last moments, but I believe he is in a better place where he is pain free from his illness.