This is unfortunately not super uncommon. Older patients, especially women in palliative care are sometimes so close to death that the transition can be hard to detect. Things like heart rate and breathing can be so faint and slow that it can be extremely difficult to detect without equipment usually not found in most nursing homes. And when the patient is in this state, they can physically appear to be deceased.

That, and end of life care is horrible in America. It's so profit driven that the facilities only hire the legally mandated amount of licenced professional to operate.

I work in orthopedics and rehabilitation, and a large part of my last job was providing specialty care at nursing homes. I've had the unfortunate experience showing up to a nursing home and finding my patient deceased when the employees just thought they were sleeping.

Two hunters are walking through the woods. One hunter falls down, hits his head on a rock and gets knocked out.

The other hunter freaks and gets out his cell phone and calls 911. When the operator picks up, the hunter says "Help! My buddy fell down and hit his head on a rock. He's not moving! I think he's dead!"

The operator says, "You think he's dead? He could still be alive! You need to make sure."

The hunter says okay and puts down the phone. The operator hears a gun shot. The hunter picks up the phone and says, "Okay, I made sure he's dead, now what?"

I do not understand how this happens. Really and truly. It is so easy to check if someone is breathing and several people are involved when it comes to moving a body to a funeral home. How does literally nobody notice ANY sign of life?

I’m sure there’s a legitimate answer but I really do struggle to comprehend this phenomenon.

Edit: I know it’s real/happens/isn’t always the result of incompetence. I feel like I was clear lol it’s just one of those things I am always baffled by despite all the rational answers. It’s a cognitive dissonance thing. Like people who are afraid of flying on planes but get in cars every day.

I was so lucky that my mother spent her last days at a nursing home seemingly unaffected by corporate greed. The staff were kind, caring and informative. I was alone with her when she passed and waited a minute or so before hitting the button to get a nurse to check on her. The Nurse Manager told me it is not uncommon for something like this to happen, so she would check Mom's vitals multiple times over fifteen minutes and then call her doctor and the funeral home for confirmation before she would be officially pronounced dead.

Maybe we should all be buried with a fully-charged phone?

This is why we tie bells to their fingers

I don't want to go on the cart!

The article image is a bad choice: a cop behind a podium usually means that someone's been murdered, which is the opposite of being unexpectedly alive.

She could be a zombie