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 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?
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.
I don’t want to go on the cart!
Oh don’t be such a baby.
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.
She could be a zombie
