Talking to a Potential Murderer: Four Possibilities

A Manager Ponders What the Hell Happened Yesterday

Green (manager): Is the person I talked to stealing narcotics from a patient, afraid of being caught, and therefore taking advantage of the easy-murder environment of elderly care settings to take care of the problem by getting a DNR on her victim?

Is the person I talked to aware there is a narcotics-theft ring in the rehab facility, and she’s covering its tracks by trying to get a DNR on my mother for scurrilous reasons?

Is the person I talked to a murderer who gets DNRs to hide their tracks like other murder nurses and doctors?

Is the person I talked to a regular, run-of-the-mill rehab facility nurse or administrator who routinely, thoughtlessly requests DNR’s on people in their 80’s for absolutely no good reason, contributing to untold unnecessary deaths out of sheer ignorance?

I find this encounter with the would-be potential murderer extremely fishy. Why would I, an estranged family member, be called about this, instead of the main contact person — my sister, who is a DOCTOR?

When my sister was contacted the death shenanigans came to an abrupt halt: she was a dead-end on the idea of a DNR. My sister called the hospital my mother was sent to. The hospital confirmed she’d been overmedicated/overdosed on narcotics, gave her Nalaxone, and she was back to normal in a flash.

Why was I asked to make a DNR decision instead of my mom’s authorized health care proxy? Because they thought they could get away with it? Or because they’re that incompetent in their record-keeping?

You’d think they’d have on file exactly WHO is authorized to make that decision. The story I was told for why my sister wasn’t called, is that they had her “incorrect phone number” — they told me that the area code was off by one number. Honestly, I don’t know I believe that! I wouldn’t be surprised to find I was lied to right there. I think there is a good chance they called me because they knew if they called my sister, a doctor, there was no chance they’d get consent for a DNR on a patient they overmedicated/overdosed.

This was one of the closest brushes with evil I’ve had in years. To be called by an absolute stranger and asked for my consent to “initiate hospice protocols” (which I know is a euphemism for a Do Not Resuscitate order) is beyond shocking. Nothing about the call added up from start to finish.

The first sentence was logically incoherent: this random stranger, who did not give me her name, told me, “We found your mother unresponsive, and she said she didn’t want to go to the hospital.“

?? The word “unresponsive,” and the words “she said” are mutually incompatible. Either you are unresponsive, or you are talking. You can’t be both at the same time. This woman may as well have called me up and said, “Hi, a circle is a triangle.“ So right out of the gate, I knew this was fishy. I didn’t know why or how, but I knew something was very wrong.

Also, in what universe does a random stranger call you about a life or death situation, and they don’t tell you their name, their position, where they’re calling from, or any identifying information? That’s also fishy.

Within three sentences, this random stranger, who had already indicated to me there was something wrong with her mind because she was saying logically incoherent things, asked my consent to “initiate hospice protocols.”

Someone who hasn’t even identified themself by name, is trying to tell me, this woman’s daughter, that my mother is on death’s door — and the unidentified person has so little compassion or communication skills that she can’t even tell me more than two sentences about the situation before she asks for consent to allow my mother to die?

This is just the most preposterous encounter with “health care“ I could conceive of in my wildest dreams of evil and insanity.

I am estranged from my mother, a severely traumatized person who developed borderline personality disorder as a result. I’m not going to pretend we are close. We are not. But as a human being who is the daughter of this woman, I am still beside myself with disturbance about this encounter.

My entire body has a spidey-sense reaction to the phone call — I feel lied to, manipulated, disgusted, and appalled by the lack of humanity. I am mind-boggled that a rehab facility could jump from “she’s not responsive“ to “death care” in three sentences. This is a completely cogent, 100% cognitively functioning, 83-year-old woman who is in rehab for a broken hip. She’s not in any way, shape or form on death’s door! She is in no way a candidate for palliative care! And she’s NOT suffering from cognitive impairment! She’s APOE 2/3! For those in the know, she has almost NO chance of ever getting dementia!

The egregious preposterousness of the idea that because she was overmedicated, she should be put on hospice is melting my brain into a puddle of horror at the world we are living in.

This is what our society does to its most vulnerable, older people? These rehab facilities are primarily owned by predatory investors who pay the aides and nurses nothing, and extract every last penny out of these older people. This is just capitalism in its raw, primal, naked, evil disgustingness. I’m lucky because I understand what the euphemism “consent to initiate hospice protocols“ really means — it means a DNR order. I’m lucky because my sister is a doctor who put a stop to these shenanigans immediately. But my heart goes out to everyone who is not so lucky…the families of the quarter of a million people who die from medical errors every year in the United States. Exactly what is it going to take for us to safeguard some of our most vulnerable against this venal, horrifying culture of death?

I pray you never get a call like this. And if you do, for God’s sake, do not consent.