once you've been told that someone is
dead my job is to go in and confirm that
death checking for life signs listening
to their chest normally after that you
know you might spend another 30 seconds
just in there I suppose maybe saying
goodbye to them in the sort of weirdest
way like you know just acknowledging
they've gone and then you pull this
sheet over their head
it seems so incredible that you know
what you're seeing is the combination of
someone's whole life
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the only things that unify us is that we
are all born and we will all die that is
not abnormal it is perfectly normal the
best deaths I guess are those that are
comfortable peaceful even if someone is
unconscious or confused they may
recognize a tone of voice perfume the
touch of her hand she quietly read him
his favorite poem just at the moment
when he died his wife and his ex-wife
spent the night sat in the hospital room
drinking alone with him seems
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particularly in this area that hospitals
are full with coded patient and
colleague described to me having seen
someone in the morning who walked to the
door who had died by the afternoon I
would get cool to look at you know one
or two deaths whereas now it seems like
there's often 10 people dying each night
in the hospital I've had to look after a
few patients they were actively dying
and they couldn't see the faces of
anyone who was looking after them
including me
you shall try and smile with your eyes
you try and like show them some emotion
as some human side make them feel like
they're not alone living their life
there was one jamaican gentleman we made
the concession of allowing his elderly
wife to come in and see him as he was
dying she had to wear a mask to wear an
apron she had to wear gloves to see and
touch her husband at the end of his life
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I got cool to see patient in the middle
of the night who was very unwell as I
came in his mobile phone was ringing
before really doing anything else on
that we've got moved on to focusing on
his medical care and trying to optimize
his oxygen he passed away before the
morning I read afterwards whether or not
there's anything I could have done to
make sure he could have spoken to his
wife
we've now had to make a blanket family
members not being able to come in to the
intensive care department people aren't
even able to come into the mortuary to
be there with with the body of their
loved one because of infection control
reasons and I think there's going to be
a huge amount of kind of emotional
trauma like that comes out of the back
of kovat because because people haven't
been able to process the deaths of their
loved one some of the staff are
struggling coming in and finding that
their list of 10 15 patients there's
only two alive for example after you
know literally one night there's a real
issue in palliative medicine with
emotional burnout but we're doing what
we can to give people as comfortable and
as normal a death as possible but you
know this is a completely abnormal
situation and we're learning as we're
going along I do think in the UK we're
quite resistant to talking about death
potentially something that that this
awful pandemic will do is is making
people kind of much more aware of their
own mortality and making it much more
acceptable to be talking about when we
are scared the first instinct is to turn
your face away from what is scaring you
and I think it's not a time to be doing
that
I think it is a time to connect converse
and just be clear about what was
important these two will end and we will
come through this and we may have
changed and some of that will be for the
worse but some of that also must be for
the good
you
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