Sweet Cough Syrup from a Pediatric Death
We rarely have pediatric deaths in the emergency department and some of my most painful emergency physician memories are of having to tell parents their child is dead.
We had a three-year-old die this last week. The father brought him in lifeless. We started CPR, put a tube in his airway to press oxygen into his lungs and gave injections of adrenalin to try to get his heart started again.
As do most dead people, he stayed dead. He was one of those “syndrome kids.” He was born with severe physical and mental abnormalities. As a result, he was destined to die and early death like this. That realization blunted the pain in seeing him dead. The pain was also dulled by the realization that he was really dead when he arrived and there was nothing I could have done about it. Still, it was heart wrenching to be with the father as he held the body of his unfortunate son.
While we were trying to revive the patient, I noticed he had obviously been given some sort of a red, sugary, fruity cough syrup sometime before he died. He had vomited so it was all over his face and in his hair. I inadvertently got some of it on myself and the smell of it kind of haunted me for the rest of the shift.
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Comments (4)
Becca
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Wait. What was the cause of death? And can you follow this story up with a happy pediatric one. Like a kid that swallowed marbles and you did that heimlich maneuver for lack of a better or more current name and the kid lived.
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tad
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I will try to look for a happy pediatric one. That is a bit harder as most of the kids we see have nothing interesting wrong with them: fevers from colds, asthma that usually responds to treatment, minor injuries. Unfortunately, if a kid is sick it is usually something serious and not a happy ending, at least not in the ED. What you are looking for needs to be found in TV and not real life. Sorry.
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Rebecca L
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I pressed “continue to read” and to my disappointment found nothing else. Why was he given cough syrup? Why was he so dead by time his dad got him there? This story is haunting me too.
~Your BADTAD fan, Rebecca L.
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tad
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Sometimes the details are interesting but may distract from the main point of the posting. Shari is always encouraging me to make things simple, especially when it comes to medical stuff that a lot of people might not understand. I meant for it to be haunting so thanks for the response.
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