All four of these ladies are to be highly commended for their compassionate care

We evaluated an elderly patient and quickly surmised that he/she had a large AAA with a dissection. The patient was stable and wanted treatment so we called vascular surgery and sent the patient to CT scan.

Shortly after returning from CT, the patient had a change in his/her level of consciousness and it was obvious that he/she was beginning to hemorrhage. Vascular surgery was in the room and given his/her age, the obvious active hemorrhage and the size of the dissection, it was decided that the patient wasn’t a surgical candidate. We made him/her comfortable.

Fortunately for the patient, there were four outstanding nurses there who provided the best end-of-life care and the most dignified death in the ER I have seen in my 22 years of emergency medicine.

Andrea Borrows, Sarah Colyer, Sarah Reardon and Kimberly Gilbert-Shea stayed with the patient until we declared him/her. They held his/her hand, played classical music (the nurses had discerned that the patient was a classical pianist), stroked his/her head and spoke with him/her.

They also asked about medications we could give to make him/her more comfortable. They advocated for this dying patient and cared for him/her in a was that represents a model of care for dying patients. All four of these ladies are to be highly commended for their compassionate care.