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Doctor explains why he checks a dead patient's Facebook before notifying their parents

Louis M. Profeta MD explains why he looks at the social media accounts of dead patients before talking their parents.

Photo from Tedx Talk on YouTube.

He checks on your Facebook page.

Losing a loved one is easily the worst moment you'll face in your life. But it can also affect the doctors who have to break it to a patient's friends and family. Louis M. Profeta MD, an Emergency Physician at St. Vincent Emergency Physicians in Indianapolis, Indiana, recently took to LinkedIn to share the reason he looks at a patient's Facebook page before telling their parents they've passed.

The post, titled "I'll Look at Your Facebook Profile Before I Tell Your Mother You're Dead," has attracted thousands of likes and comments.

"It kind of keeps me human," Profeta starts. "You see, I'm about to change their lives — your mom and dad, that is. In about five minutes, they will never be the same, they will never be happy again."

"Right now, to be honest, you're just a nameless dead body that feels like a wet bag of newspapers that we have been pounding on, sticking IV lines and tubes and needles in, trying desperately to save you. There's no motion, no life, nothing to tell me you once had dreams or aspirations. I owe it to them to learn just a bit about you before I go in."

"Because right now... all I am is mad at you, for what you did to yourself and what you are about to do to them. I know nothing about you. I owe it to your mom to peek inside of your once-living world.”

Dr. Louis Profeta, health, death, doctors

Dr. Profeta talks his experience with the death of a patient.

Photo from Tedx Talk on YouTube.

Profeta explains that the death of a patient makes him angry:

"Maybe you were texting instead of watching the road, or you were drunk when you should have Ubered. Perhaps you snorted heroin or Xanax for the first time or a line of coke, tried meth or popped a Vicodin at the campus party and did a couple shots.”

"Maybe you just rode your bike without a helmet or didn't heed your parents' warning when they asked you not to hang out with that 'friend,' or to be more cautious when coming to a four-way stop. Maybe you just gave up."

"Maybe it was just your time, but chances are... it wasn't."

personalization, trauma, mental health, social media

The facebook app.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Profeta goes on to explain why he checks a patient's Facebook page:

"So I pick up your faded picture of your driver's license and click on my iPhone, flip to Facebook and search your name. Chances are we'll have one mutual friend somewhere. I know a lot of people.”

"I see you wearing the same necklace and earrings that now sit in a specimen cup on the counter, the same ball cap or jacket that has been split open with trauma scissors and pulled under the backboard, the lining stained with blood. Looks like you were wearing it to the U2 concert. I heard it was great."

"I see your smile, how it should be, the color of eyes when they are filled with life, your time on the beach, blowing out candles, Christmas at Grandma's; oh you have a Maltese, too. I see that. I see you standing with your mom and dad in front of the sign to your college. Good, I'll know exactly who they are when I walk into the room. It makes it that much easier for me, one less question I need to ask.”

"You're kind of lucky that you don't have to see it. Dad screaming your name over and over, mom pulling her hair out, curled up on the floor with her hand over her head as if she's trying to protect herself from unseen blows.”

"I check your Facebook page before I tell them you're dead because it reminds me that I am talking about a person, someone they love — it quiets the voice in my head that is screaming at you right now shouting: 'You mother f--ker, how could you do this to them, to people you are supposed to love!'"

— Updated June 5, 2019.

This article originally appeared on June 5, 2019

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ER doctor in Canada writes 'climate change' on patient's chart in an unprecedented diagnosis

Photo by kerry rawlinson on Unsplash

Climate change is causing record-breaking heat and intense wildfire seasons, worsening health issues.

As record-breaking heat and out-of-control wildfires raged in the beautiful Canadian province of British Columbia this past summer, people started arriving to the emergency room of Kootenay Lake Hospital with symptoms of heat illness.

Dr. Kyle Merritt, the head of the emergency department, told the Times Colonist that most of the doctors at the hospital had only seen such heat illness in medical school. Now they found themselves with a flood of it as the temperatures rose.

"We were having to figure out how do we cool someone in the emergency department," said Merritt. "People are running out to the Dollar Store to buy spray bottles."

A patient arrived who was struggling to breathe. The smoke from the wildfires in the area hadn't lifted for days, and the patient's asthma was being aggravated by it.

Merritt took the patient's chart and wrote two words he'd never written on a chart before: "climate change."

When asked why he did it, Merritt said, "If we're not looking at the underlying cause, and we're just treating the symptoms, we're just gonna keep falling further and further behind."

"It's me trying to just...process what I'm seeing," he said. "We're in the emergency department, we look after everybody, from the most privileged to the most vulnerable, from cradle to grave, we see everybody. And it's hard to see people, especially the most vulnerable people in our society, being affected. It's frustrating."

Merritt said a woman in her 70s who lived in a trailer with no air-conditioning had come into the ER. She was struggling to stay hydrated, and the heat was exacerbating her other health conditions, including diabetes and some heart failure. Patients like her, with multiple health problems and little money, will be the most affected by the climate crisis.

However, we're all seeing that there's no escaping its impact. Hundreds died during this summer's heat dome in western Canada and the northwestern United States. An entire Canadian village was wiped out by wildfire as temperatures reached a record 121 degrees this summer. We've been told for years that climate change would result in more extreme weather events, and here we are.

Merritt said he hoped seeing "climate change" on the patient's chart would prompt other doctors who see it one day to make the connection between their patients' health and climate change.

Extreme weather affects more than people's physical health. Merritt says he saw a number of patients already suffering from depression or anxiety have their symptoms worsen during the wildfire season. Wildfire smoke even triggered flashbacks in a patient who was coping with post-traumatic stress disorder from his time as a soldier.

The World Health Organization calls climate change "the single biggest health threat facing humanity" and health professionals worldwide are responding. Doctors and nurses in western Canada held a climate rally at the B.C. Legislature organized by Doctors for Planetary Health—West Coast on November 4. The healthcare workers are calling on lawmakers to act in the face of the growing ecological threat to health and demanding that the provincial government declare a climate and ecological emergency.

Writing "climate change" on a patient's chart may be unprecedented, but so are the times in which we live. If we are going to keep breaking records each year and keep seeing health-affecting extremes in temperature and weather events, we're going to have to do unprecedented things. Doctors and nurses are on the front lines, seeing those health impacts firsthand.

Perhaps we should listen to them.

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Man returns to the ICU where he almost died of COVID-19 to apologize to healthcare workers

ABC7/Facebook

Richard Soliz spent 28 days at Harborview Medical Center and nearly died of COVID-19.

Throughout the pandemic, we've seen countless stories of patients in the ICU, terribly sick with COVID-19, still insisting that the virus isn't real. Such stories of denial are frustrating, especially for healthcare workers who are doing their best to save people's lives.

That's why this story of a COVID patient returning to the hospital to thank—and apologize to—the medical staff who helped him offers a ray of hope that not all who are in denial will stay that way.

According to KOMO News, Richard Soliz hadn't known anyone who had gotten sick from the coronavirus. He had also fallen prey to misinformation on social media about the vaccine, so had chosen not to get vaccinated. Then he fell ill in late August, spiked a fever and found it difficult to breathe.

"That's when I really knew I was in a bad situation," Soliz said. "That's when I knew, hey, this is COVID. Man. I contracted the virus."

Soliz told KOMO he was embarrassed when staff at Seattle's Harborview Medical Center asked him if he was vaccinated. Pulmonologist and director of the ICU Dr. James Town told CNN that when Soliz was admitted, about 99 out of 100 COVID-19 patients at Harborview had not been vaccinated

Soliz ended up spending 28 days in the hospital. He was put on a ventilator and a heart monitor in the ICU and nearly didn't make it.

"I am certain that there is truth to this virus, and not being vaccinated leaves you vulnerable to the extent of possibly really taking a person's life," Soliz said. "I personally know that, because I was not vaccinated. I did not act, I wasn't certain, and I nearly lost my life."

Soliz did make it, though. Then he did something that few unvaccinated COVID-19 survivors do. He went back to the hospital to thank the medical team that treated him—and apologize for not getting vaccinated.

"I was literally on my deathbed and hanging from a string, and [doctors and nurses] tended to me as perfect strangers," Soliz told CNN. "I just had to say something."

Soliz thanked Dr. Town and told him he deeply regretted not getting the vaccine.

"No one blames you or judges you," Town responded. "Everyone is just happy that you are willing to share the story, I think. And happy that you're better."

Healthcare workers are heroes. Seriously.

"It's emotional for us to see someone do well," Town told KOMO News. "Particularly when things are so dark."

Other staff members were moved by Soliz's apology and gratitude.

"We do put so much of our own heart into the care and worry," nurse Kimmy Siebens said. "We never really get to see people get that much better. And so it's amazing. It makes it feel like it's definitely all worth it, you know?"

Soliz has a message he wants everyone to hear:

"Please go get vaccinated because this virus is real. Real enough to take someone's life (or) put you in the ICU."

Though a majority of American adults have gotten vaccinated, misinformation about the vaccines has resulted in millions of people choosing to reject the COVID-19 vaccines. Public health experts have tried every which way to convey to the public that the No. 1 thing people can do to mitigate the effects of the pandemic and safely get back to normal is to get vaccinated. Vaccines make viral infection and transmission less likely, and drastically reduce the chances of hospitalization and death. It's unfortunate that it may take more stories like Soliz's to convince some people, but here we are.

Thank you, Richard Soliz, for acknowledging you made a mistake and for serving as a good example of humility and gratitude after your hospitalization.

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