A 74-year-old woman believed to have died while in hospice care was found to be breathing after being transported to a funeral home, authorities in Nebraska said Monday.
The woman had been transported from a nursing home, where she had been declared dead at around 9:44 a.m. local time, to the Butherus-Maser & Love Funeral Home in Lincoln on Monday morning, according to the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office.
Authorities responded to the funeral home after an employee noticed the woman was breathing and “instantly called 911” at approximately 11:44 a.m., according to Lancaster County Chief Deputy Ben Houchin.
This is unfortunately not super uncommon. Older patients, especially women in palliative care are sometimes so close to death that the transition can be hard to detect. Things like heart rate and breathing can be so faint and slow that it can be extremely difficult to detect without equipment usually not found in most nursing homes. And when the patient is in this state, they can physically appear to be deceased.
That, and end of life care is horrible in America. It’s so profit driven that the facilities only hire the legally mandated amount of licenced professional to operate.
I work in orthopedics and rehabilitation, and a large part of my last job was providing specialty care at nursing homes. I’ve had the unfortunate experience showing up to a nursing home and finding my patient deceased when the employees just thought they were sleeping.
Two hunters are walking through the woods. One hunter falls down, hits his head on a rock and gets knocked out.
The other hunter freaks and gets out his cell phone and calls 911. When the operator picks up, the hunter says “Help! My buddy fell down and hit his head on a rock. He’s not moving! I think he’s dead!”
The operator says, “You think he’s dead? He could still be alive! You need to make sure.”
The hunter says okay and puts down the phone. The operator hears a gun shot. The hunter picks up the phone and says, “Okay, I made sure he’s dead, now what?”
My favorite version of this is a farmhand running over a pig on his way to work and calling the farmer to ask what to do. He says no matter what he does the poor pig won’t stop squealing. Farmer says you gotta put him down and he hears a gunshot. Farmhand comes back and asks what he should do about the flashing lights on the pigs motorcycle.
That was unreasonably and unacceptably funny. You bastard.
I think this was the first version of that I heard:
My horse broke his leg. I called the vet and he said “Not much I can do. You’re gonna have to shoot 'em.”
I don’t know why.
But if he don’t start getting better soon I’ma have to shoot 'em again.
I do not understand how this happens. Really and truly. It is so easy to check if someone is breathing and several people are involved when it comes to moving a body to a funeral home. How does literally nobody notice ANY sign of life?
I’m sure there’s a legitimate answer but I really do struggle to comprehend this phenomenon.
Edit: I know it’s real/happens/isn’t always the result of incompetence. I feel like I was clear lol it’s just one of those things I am always baffled by despite all the rational answers. It’s a cognitive dissonance thing. Like people who are afraid of flying on planes but get in cars every day.
If she’s cold, has an extremely faint pulse, and is barely breathing… She’s already in hospice care, she’s expected to die. If her vital signs become so faint as to be undetectable, they think it finally happened. Then after a while, they get a little stronger, enough to be noticed.
While my experience of elder care paints a picture of negligence there are also documented cases where people “die” and then “stop being dead” like this.
It’s called Lazarus Syndrome. I was exposed to a case once at a large ER while waiting for a bed for my own patient (hello, am paramedic). Not too much to say about it, the ED staff were working a code, like they do, and called it. About twenty minutes later, some staff was in the room cleaning up when they noticed the patient breathing and told the nurses. Staff came running like hell and worked them for another 15-20 minutes before calling it again. Weird shit, and pretty unusual in my experience, AFAIK we still don’t understand the mechanism behind it.
Thank you for your service.
Thanks, I appreciate it
You need to re watch the Princess Bride
It could be partially a numbers game. Think about accidents that happen during surgery that should never happen. People die all the time. Eventually, you will have a stack up of human errors even when we assume the best intentions.
Nursing homes and the entire home care industry have been thoroughly ransacked by private equity.
And what’s even more pernicious about this case of corporate raiding, is that the public actually believes the lie that these industries and businesses are not profitable.
They are highly profitable, but all the funds are siphoned off and legally embezzled the way private equity always does: exhorbanant consulting fees and switching the vendors and suppliers to their own companies, and jacking up the rates they charge themselves.
And that’s before you even get into the favorable legislation they purchase through donations, and the refusal to adequately staff the companies.
I am sadly all too aware of the effect of PE firms on these institutions. They destroy everything they touch.
Why do you think Wakes are a thing?
I was so lucky that my mother spent her last days at a nursing home seemingly unaffected by corporate greed. The staff were kind, caring and informative. I was alone with her when she passed and waited a minute or so before hitting the button to get a nurse to check on her. The Nurse Manager told me it is not uncommon for something like this to happen, so she would check Mom’s vitals multiple times over fifteen minutes and then call her doctor and the funeral home for confirmation before she would be officially pronounced dead.
Maybe we should all be buried with a fully-charged phone?
Saved by the bell
A saying thought to originate from the old custom of safety coffins … where corpses were tied to a string to the surface above them to a bell. So that in case they didn’t die and were still alive, their moving body could pull the string and ring the bell.
If you were buried alive, and you rang the bell and were rescued … you were ‘saved by the bell’
And here I thought it originated from Zack Morris’ tendency to not know the answer to a question asked at the end of the class period.
Like a Safety coffin for Sarah O’Bannon.
There was a guy in the town where I live entombed with a telephone back in 1910.
Humorously enough, this was a thing back in the day: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/sponsored/people-feared-being-buried-alive-so-much-they-invented-these-special-safety-coffins-180970627/
This is why we tie bells to their fingers
I don’t want to go on the cart!
The article image is a bad choice: a cop behind a podium usually means that someone’s been murdered, which is the opposite of being unexpectedly alive.
