Hi all,
This post is to discuss the experience of treating a patient who ends up passing away while still on your patient lists (and no, not as of a result of your treatment but more for uncurable medical reasons). Over last weekend, my patient with an exacerbation of COPD and a history of severe lung cancer passed away after the medical team could not get her breathing issues under control. I has been treating this patient for up to one hour every day for the previous week and had finally begun to form a close bond with her (she was initially difficult and thus I was quite happy with the raport we had develpoed).
Once my supervisor told me on arrival to the ward that my patient had passed away, I felt very odd. I felt initially very sad of course and then I felt a strange emotion that was difficult to interperate. During our last treatment session, my patient had made great progress as she had finally managed to get out of bed and take some steps. Thus when I was told that all of the hours spent working very hard with this patient had been in the end unsuccessful. Once I was over the initial shock, I got to work and hardly had time to ponder the situation properly. Now on reflection of the situation, I wonder what a normal reaction to this kind of experience is: as a professional, we are suppossed to keep a certain distnce from our patients personally, however as we know, after spending a certain amount of time with one person, you begin to learn more about them and get closer. The greiving process is different, so I wonder whether it is acceptable to really greive the loss of our patients like we owuld other people in our lives or do we not really have this right as we only really knew the patient for a short period of time and really knew nothing much about who they were previously. If any of you guys have experinced the death of your patient and have thought about this as well, I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts,
Thanks, Kate.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Hi Kate,
I worked as a carer in palliative care for about a year, so I know a bit about getting attached to clients/patients and then finding out they have passed away. I guess what you have to do I create that professional boundary that is always talked about BUT that can often be easier said than done if you are spending quite a lot of time with a patient. Funnily enough though, the more patients you see pass away, the more blase you get towards death, and the better able you are to handle the situation ie. know what to say to family members. That sounds pretty horrible, but it is true. Think about nurses- they look after patients 24/7 and have patients pass away all the time. If nurses broke down every time a patient died, then nothing would get done. For some people death can be pretty confronting and upsetting, and the good thing about physiotherapy is that you can always choose to work in an area where death of a patient is less likely ie. private practice. If you chose to work in an area with sicker patients/clients then death of a patient will be inevitable. As long as you know you provided them with the best service you could at the time, then you should feel comforted that you probably helped them achieve some of their goals (ie getting out of bed and taking a few steps) to give them some dignity before they passed away.
Ez
Post a Comment