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TW: death and dying
I’ve sat with dying patients. Where possible, if your team thinks you are going to die and no loved ones are available someone will be asked to sit with you. It’s often a junior member of the nursing staff or a student. It’s...a lot.
I’ve sat with dying patients. Where possible, if your team thinks you are going to die and no loved ones are available someone will be asked to sit with you. It’s often a junior member of the nursing staff or a student. It’s...a lot.
The deaths I witnessed were mostly peaceful. They were very old, very sick people and it was just their time. Some were over 100. But there’s a level of violation being a stranger witnessing someone’s last breaths. It always hurt that I wasn’t someone who knew and loved them.
You don’t do much. You take obs every half an hour or so depending on what their doctor wants charted. If it’s an expected death you often don’t give food and water in the last few days but you try to keep their lips and mouth moistened for comfort. Sometimes I held their hands.
Once I sang a little because the patient had liked it when she heard me singing along to the radio when she was still lucid.
Twice I saw people die violently, because something had gone horribly wrong in their bodies. Those hurt the worst. Your last moments shouldn’t be alarms, people (often strangers) scrambling for the crash cart, tensely asking if you’re to be resuscitated. No one wants that.
I also washed and prepared bodies for the morgue. People I had cared for. We always tried to make or find time to perform the last offices slowly and methodically out of respect, even if it meant tying up a bed for a few hours.
I found the last offices cathartic. It’s one last act of care for the patient, honouring the fact that they were once a living person. You wash them, remove any lines or devices, clean their mouth and lips, comb their hair, tape wedding rings in place to ensure they aren’t lost.
Sometimes when you care for a body that you cared for in life, you feel guilt. It was a reason I often volunteered to do it - nothing anchors you in the importance of caring for people with dignity and compassion than knowing that in someone’s...
... last days you were too slow bringing a meal and it was cold, or you had to rush their wash because you were busy and stressed. It humbles you and reminds you what is important. But that guilt hurts and it leaves a mark.
I’m writing this because we are talking about deaths and the mental health of NHS staff in very statistical, disconnected ways. I think it’s easy to assume that death is part of the job, they can cope, it’s the workload that’s the problem.
But deaths are always painful. Some NHS staff are likely seeing more deaths over this period than in the rest of their career combined, especially those who have been redeployed to more acute wards. You get tough and you get used to it, but that hardness also takes a toll.
I cant imagine the pain of NHS staff who are going through that and it haunts me. They aren’t going to be able to wait till a quiet period in the afternoon so they can take their time to care for the dead and pay respects.
Losing so many with a backdrop of chaos and under resourcing & understaffing & exhaustion, no time to stand in the toilet & ugly cry silently for thirty seconds before you go back out...it’s brutal and it’s inhumane. Every death is a person and we can’t let numbers obscure that.
But each death is also the people who cared for that person - doctors, nurses, health care assistants, physios, anaesthetists and the death hurts them too.
I remember sitting with patients who were dying and desperately wishing I was someone they loved, who knew them, who could pay proper respect and give proper comfort.
Often families (if they had them) would be come for a last visit. No one said it out loud but everyone knew. It was smoothed by the pretence and cups of tea. When they said goodbye, someone would usually say brightly ‘I’ll see you again tomorrow mum!’
The brutality of having a tiny window of time to say goodbye, via a screen, is something we have kind of...gotten used to? But we can’t. This isn’t a good death, for anyone. I don’t care that people die all the time, no one would choose to go this way.
You wouldn’t choose it for your loved ones. Please don’t get numb to it. 80,000 dead. When we remember those who died in war we remind ourselves to horror, the fear, the violence. Covid is just as bad. It’s fearful and often violent.
I know this is a bit rambly and overwrought but it’s been on my mind a lot recently. I can’t stop thinking how brutal it must be to have to rush the end, without enough time to process or take time. To lose people who’s lives are ending in fear and pain, over and over again.
My experience in healthcare was relatively short, it was limited & some time ago & I can only speak to that experience. But i want to put those numbers in a human context, even just a little bit. Dont let death (avoidable, brutal death) &those who witness it become abstract.
And every day you take steps NOT to spread a deadly disease - think of the lives you are saving from a nasty, traumatising death. And don’t vote for the fucking tories.
