On the sick bed or even death bed, many older patients want to clean the table again. The contact persons are then the nursing staff – whether they want to listen or not.
On the bedside, when the end of life may be near or inevitable, many patients reflect on their lives again. Your contacts are then often nurses in the hospitals – they are not only responsible for health care, but also for pastoral care. That can be overwhelming at times.
The training did not prepare him for how many elderly patients would confess to decades of murders, wrote a nurse on Twitter. In old age, some people seem to want to ease their conscience again and are looking for someone to talk to. The nurse’s experience is not unique: other nurses reported on Twitter about the dark secrets that patients entrusted to them.
Death bed confessions of murder
Often it is about crimes, not infrequently about murders. A nurse told of two murderers who confessed to him. One had already been convicted and “eaten away by guilt”. The other murder case, however, had not yet been resolved: “The police found the body exactly at the location he had specified.” Shortly afterwards the patient died himself.
Even memories of war are often only uttered on the sick bed. One patient reported how he tried to kill a baby with a hand grenade during World War II because it was mixed-race – his supervisor had just dissuaded him from doing it. Another admitted to having shot his commanding officer from behind during World War I. A nurse reports that a woman with Alzheimer’s thought she was her husband – and warned her that no one should find the bodies of her children.
Other patients talked about how they had molested children in their lives. “I couldn’t look after him the next day,” says one of the nurses. Sometimes they are nice, older men who then turn out to be sex offenders.
Patients talk about shame experiences
However, it is not always the patients who are the culprits. Some only speak in the hospital about injustice and suffering they have experienced for which they were too ashamed in their previous lives. “I have had many patients who have said that they have been abused by their partners or relatives,” writes one nurse: “The health sector is definitely not for the squeamish.”
Sometimes the nurses are asked not only as listeners, but also as advisors – for questions that come out of nowhere and “which nobody warns you about”, as a nurse writes on Twitter: someone once asked her if he would tell his brother supposed that the father abused him as a child for years.
