Topics: Health, Mental Health
The prospect of dying can be a scary experience for some people, but nurses who care for those in end-of-life situations are typically well-practised at gently guiding people with kindness towards the end of their lives and making this process less terrifying.
For those care professionals who work in hospices, dying is an everyday fact of life. As a result, the mortal processes often become as familiar to nurses as the changing of the seasons are to farmers.
But this also means that they can tell when something strange is happening. Including some of the 'miracles' that can happen, even when it looks like a patient is loudly banging on death's door.
Hospice nurse Julie McFadden, who has grown a large following thanks to her end-of-life stories, spoke to actor-turned-podcaster Rainn Wilson about some of the crazier things she has seen while working the death shift. Including the 'chilling' call she got after leaving a dying patient who suddenly got up and started walking around.
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Comic actor Wilson, who played Dwight Schrute on The Office, spoke to nurse McFadden at length about how she wanted to reframe how people viewed death, with many people experiencing a calm and peaceful death as the body shuts down.
This can sometimes involve what the medical professional called 'miracles', where a person undergoes a sudden change or experiences a visual hallucination that she termed as 'angels'.
But they can also involve just plain medical marvels. McFadden shared a 'crazy story' about a hospice admission, where a woman in her 50s was 'actively dying' after becoming unconscious and experiencing irregular breathing. With oxygen deprivation setting in, the end did not seem far.
"There's no coming back from this," the nurse recalled thinking.
McFadden noticed a tell-tale sign setting in on the patient as she clocked off for the night, with her blue lips indicating hypoxemia - a red flag that her oxygen saturation was remaining dangerously low and that she was about to die.
But after the nurse had clocked off for the night, she had a 'chilling' phone call with the woman's family. Her son surprisingly said that she had a 'great' night and slept soundly, with the nurse wondering if that meant she was dead.
Expecting them to say that she had then died, she was stunned to hear that the woman had in fact stood up, walked around, and started making pancakes. "She's eating pancakes in the kitchen," the son told the stunned nurse.
McFadden turned to the host and said: "100 percent miracle Rainn, absolutely no scientific way this woman could come back to life like that, the way she looked."
Despite the nurse being unable to understand what had caused her sudden recovery and appetite for pancakes, the patient would ultimately live for another three months. Which would have been a miracle for her family, at the least.
