Before medicine was a science, loved ones would place a bell on top of a grave so that if the doctors made a mistake, the awakened — and presumably terrified — occupant of the grave could alert those close by that the burial had taken place in error.
Of course, that doesn’t happen anymore. The medical establishment is far too sophisticated, and far too regulated, for a terrible mistake like that to happen. Nowadays we have machines that tell us when we’re dead. And not just when we’re merely dead, but when we’re really, really, sincerely dead.
There was a munchkin coroner. He did an autopsy on the Wicked Witch. pic.twitter.com/l8WfP33zLV
— Jacob Evans (@vumpire) January 15, 2023
Quoting the coroner from The Wizard of Oz may be a little cheesy, but it gets the point across. Even the Munchkins knew how to tell when someone was dead.
Us? Not so much.
From the Des Moines Register:
A continuing care home in Urbandale is being fined $10,000 after declaring one of its residents dead and transferring her to a funeral home in Ankeny, where she was found to still be alive.
A report from the Iowa Department of Inspection and Appeals says the mistaken death declaration occurred on Jan. 3 after a staff member at the Glen Oaks Alzheimer’s Special Care Center reported that the woman, 66, had died about 6 a.m. The report said the woman, who had early onset dementia, anxiety and depression, had been in hospice care since Dec. 28.
The staff member reported she could no longer feel the woman’s pulse and alerted a nurse practitioner, who made the death declaration, the report said. Iowa law allows nurses and physicians’ assistants, in addition to doctors, to declare a patient dead.
A couple of hours later, the not-quite-dead woman was taken to the funeral home. There, an unidentified staff member unzipped the body bag and promptly shed at least a decade of his life when the undead woman “gasped for air.” The staff called 911, and the woman was taken to a hospital. When she had recovered sufficiently, she was returned to the Ankeny hospice facility, where on January 5 she was “morally, ethically, spiritually, physically positively, absolutely undeniably and reliably” pronounced dead.
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“We care deeply about our residents and we remain fully committed to supporting their end-of-life care. All of our employees are given regular training in how best to support end-of-life care and the death transition for our residents,” said Lisa Eastman, executive director of the Glen Oaks Alzheimer’s Special Care Center.
That’s nice to hear. While you’re training your employees to be all empathetic and everything, maybe you you could train your employees to recognize the difference between life and death.
As for me, put a bell on top of my grave just in case.
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