For a few hours, our emergency department was Octogenarian Central.

It seemed like every patient that registered to be seen was in their 80′s. Weakness. Dizziness. Constipation. Chest pain. More weakness. Hip pain. Eight out of ten patients were octogenarians. Family members accompanied all of the patients and helped us piece together the multiple medical problems. After my second disimpaction of the afternoon, I longed for a kid with an ear infection.

Then we got an ambulance call. Patient down. Full arrest. Family trying to perform CPR. Yup … he was 81.

The story was especially difficult. The patient was sitting in his living room watching TV with his wife. He suddenly had trouble breathing. He told his family to call the ambulance because he felt like he was going to die.
When the ambulance got there, the patient had arrested. Paramedics did a great job getting back a pulse, but it was short-lived. When the patient hit our doors, he had no pulse.

We tried to revive him, but to no avail. Another angel gets some wings.

Informing the family was difficult. I’ve always said that telling families that a patient has died is one of the most difficult things in medicine. Hasn’t changed in all these years.

But there was a bit of a funny twist to the sad situation.

We called the coroner after the patient dies. He has to come to investigate and release the body. The coroner for this town is a great guy. Probably early 70′s himself. Every once in a while, he just randomly stops in with popcorn or ice cream for the emergency department staff.

He came in wearing a baseball cap with his trademark smile. He patted me on the back and asked me what room the deceased patient was in. I was on the phone, so I pointed to the patient’s room and kept talking.

The coroner walked over to the room, pulled open the curtain to the room, looked at the patient, and screamed out loud. Then the patient screamed out loud. He came back out of the room sweating and looking a bit peaked about the gills.

“I thought you said that the patient was in Room 12!”
“No. I pointed to Room 11.”
“Holy crap, you almost gave me a heart attack. I walked into the room expecting to see a dead person and then she rolls over on the bed. My heart’s still palpitating!”
The daughter of the patient in Room 12 then walks out of the room laughing nervously. “How do you think I felt … seeing the coroner walk into my mom’s room when she isn’t even that sick?”

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 5th, 2010 at 5:53 am and is filed under Patient Encounters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.