‘He was a middle-aged livestock farmer whose cows had made him sick, so we put him in a quarantined room in the hospital. He had paratyphoid, a serious intestinal infection that had most likely come from contaminated milk. I can still see him lying there in his bed – to this day I know what room he was in.
The antibiotics weren’t working, so our efforts were focused on trying to find the right treatment. He was nauseous, with a fever and chronic diarrhoea. He needed a bedpan once an hour, despite the fact that his bowels were already empty. When I started my first night shift that week, he introduced himself and made a curious announcement. He told me that I would be present at his death – which, he firmly asserted, would be in seven days’ time.
I didn’t worry myself about it. He was in a bad way, sure, but nothing pointed to his condition being fatal. We chatted together, about the farm and his family, but every time our talks would return to his premonition. He counted down the nights, one by one. Standing at his bedside during my last night shift, he added a time to his prediction: by six o’clock the next morning, he would be gone. A haunting sensation crept over me – could he be right after all? I called the physician, who took my report seriously and came over. He examined the patient but found nothing of concern. Call me if you really get worried, he said.
Because he needed a bedpan every hour, I could at least keep an eye on him and monitor his condition. At around three, he said he felt a tightness in his chest. His breathing seemed normal, but I called the physician anyway, who got out of bed and came immediately. He examined the farmer thoroughly, even took an X-ray of his chest and lungs right there, but there was nothing alarming. The patient was given extra oxygen to help him breathe more easily.
At a quarter to six, he called again. I grabbed a bedpan and headed to his room. When I walked in, I saw him lurch diagonally sideways across the cushions, and his eyes rolled back into his head. I dropped the bedpan, sounded the alarm, lowered the bed and started CPR. The physician was there in a flash, along with the resuscitation team. We worked on him for forty-five minutes, did all we could, but he was beyond rescue.
Half an hour later my shift was over, and I went home. It was nearly forty years ago now, but I can still recall the state I was in, how empty I felt. I never spoke to his family, and there was no autopsy. Septicaemia was the presumed cause of death.
How bizarre is it that a patient could predict the very moment of his own death, down to the last minute? That whole week it had been a foregone conclusion to him, which I’d dismissed as incredulous nonsense. I never discussed it with any of my colleagues afterwards. But since that night in 1981, I now know that I should take my patients’ suspicions more seriously.
Later, when I started working as a nurse anaesthetist, I regularly saw the same thing during my brief but intense conversations with patients in the moments before an operation. Patients know their own bodies so well, their predictions about recovery and the consequences of the procedure are often right. We have a tendency just to brush them off and try to justify everything rationally.
But we can’t control everything, not even with the latest medications and state-of-the-art technologies. I, too, thought we had the upper hand, that we could beat the farmer’s infection with antibiotics. Now I realise that there’s more to heaven and earth than in our philosophy and that sometimes things happen that we can’t explain. And you know what? I find it quite a comforting thought.’