How do doctors determine the amount of time a terminally ill patient has left?
In: 330
Best guess.
Then, if the patient is staying in the hospital or in a palliative care unit, until they pass, it’s laid on the nurses.
And the nurses get asked multiple times a day by the family how much longer. And all we can do is guess based upon the signs we see the patient exhibiting.
The worst one I was off on was 3 days. At the last hospital my coworkers were off by -1 day. Literally had a dead patient turning purple and let rhe family visit. The machine he was on for breathing was giving him a false pulse and chest rise. As soon as he became my patient I removed it and it all stopped in seconds. The hospital still uses it as an example to assess your patients not just casually glance at them.
But it gets easier as the patient gets nearer to death. There are some wild cards which are difficult to factor. Heart attack usually.
We’ve had patients brought up that died within minutes of getting on the floor. One must have been dying and rotting for a long time prior to her last breath. Another with liver failure died as his wife was unpacking his bags.
Doctors absolutely hate being near death. Especially covid deaths. So nurses are the ones there with the morphine and other drugs to ease things. We’re the ones with the guilty conscience following doctors orders. Well, if we feel guilt. Sometimes it’s time to go.
-Frankie’s husband
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