Dealing with Patient Mortality

On my cardiopulmonary placement, I was faced with many emotional experiences. In particular, one comes to mind. I had been treating this one particular patient for three weeks, and he was approaching discharge. From his history, he was very unwell, and was an inpatient for multiple months.
He had a very supportive family, in particular his son, who I had met on multiple occasions. I had given this patients son education regarding his father’s progress, as well as his oxygen therapy, and just idle chit-chat also.
In my final week, I noticed on the Monday that this patient of mine was not on the list. I heard a loud response from another Physiotherapist, who had been treating this patient before myself, stating that she can’t believe he had passed away. I immediately felt quite overwhelmed for a moment, having realised that my patient had passed away. I was later told that this patient was getting discharged over the weekend, was all packed and ready to go waiting in his chair for transport, and had a heart attack and passed away in his chair while waiting for his car to arrive.
The question that this experience brought to me, was how do we and other health professionals deal with the loss of a patient-particulary when it is someone seen regularly, for instance twice every day? What I found interesting is how everything keeps going as though nothing happened- the staff don’t have a choice.
I realised the importance of having a supportive family/friend environment to come home to post work, to be able to deal with these strong emotional responses that come from working in these high intensity areas. It is also extremely importan to be confident in your own abilities, to be able to say that you did all you could to return this patient to home, or greater functional independence to improve their QOL, to not hold blame for when patients don’t make it home.
I also realise that it is not optimal to get too close to patients-although sometimes it is difficult not to. Having completed this placement, it was in fact my favourite, and most rewarding. It challenged me, and I was able to meet the challenge, through experiences like the one described.