Mr X is a 56y.o. and was admitted to hospital for urinary tract infection (UTI).
A few days after admission, Mr X was referred for physiotherapy for administration of BiPAP. According to the doctors, he had sustained a stroke during the stay in the hospital and the stroke resulted in him having difficulty in breathing. BiPAP was to help to decrease his work of breathing and to normalise his ABGs. Mr X tolerated BiPAP well and was weaned off the machine two days later.
However, things didn’t go well and he was back on the BiPAP the next day (Friday). His GCS score had decreased once again and the doctors suspected that he was most likely to have had another stroke. They are not able to come up with a definite diagnosis as the CT scan knows no signs of an infarct.
After the weekend, I was back to the hospital again and got to know that Mr X had passed away the night before, due to ?cardiac arrest. It was really shocking. A man who was just admitted for a minor problem of UTI, his status had declined so drastically to the point of death. Life is so unexpected. I spoke to the nurse taking care of Mr X. She told me she had learnt not to get too emotional with patients. It is important to build a good rapport with patients and do our best for them. However, it is also important not to get too emotional. If not, when incidents like this happen, it would affect our work and thus affect other patients.
For our profession, this is definitely an issue we would face in the future. I am glad that I experienced it now and learnt from it so that I know how to deal with it in the future.
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I too had a patient pass away on me this past week. He was endstage motorneurone disease and had been admitted for assistance with airway clearance. While it was well known that this man would likely not leave the hospital, you can't help but to feel some sort of grief for the patient (any patient/person who passes away). While the nurse is probably correct in saying that one cannot become too attached. I think that we owe it to all our patients to provide them with the respect that life itself deserves. I guess this is all part of our learning and developing as therapists in primary healthcare.
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