A friend of my wife’s died suddenly over the weekend. She was in a car accident on Tuesday, but while her vehicle was totalled she walked away in what seemed minimal distress, and so she did not go the hospital right away. The next day, feeling more pain, she went to the hospital to get checked out, but still didn’t seem in significant distress; she posted jokes from the hospital, complained that she had forgotten her cell phone charger, and wanted someone to record a TV show for her because she had forgotten to set her DVR, and left thinking that all was well. Friday afternoon she bitched amusingly about her insurance company, worried about the San Bernadino shootout causing a backlash against Muslims, and looked forward to the Doctor Who season finale. Friday night she suffered what someone called an “acute medical crisis” and perished.
Assuming she took some hidden injury during the accident that caused her death (which of course is not certain), what might it have been, given that the paramedics and doctors all missed it?
IANAD and all that but what came to mind was a thromboembolism. What would have happened in that case would be that she had small internal wounds (small explains why the doctors didn’t find anything) and a clot in a vein eventually started moving (a traveling clot is called a thromb). At one point it reached a key organ or blocked a key vessel and she died.
I know that’s one thing doctors worry about a lot after someone is in a crash or similar accident.
Feel free to speculate. I do not actually need a correct answer, just a possibility. I’m sure her family is looking for that, and she was only a friend-in-law. I am simply curious.
We lost a friend a few years ago (drunk driving) to a tear in her liver. She was in the hospital because of abdominal pain and blacking out, she was a large woman and by the time they figured out what was wrong she had already slipped into a coma.
Without knowing past medical history and record of ER workup any speculation is obviously uninformed.
In addition to possible factors previously mentioned, it is not unknown for previously healthy people to die of existing, unsuspected pathology, like a myocardial infarction and/or arrhythmia unrelated to the accident.
Sounds like a potential medical examiner case. Whether they’d do a post would be up to the judgment of the ME or coroner.
A while back, a co-worker had a relative who died unexpectedly after a brief illness (by brief, I’m talking about a matter of hours), and (long story made short) we all thought the family was sitting on a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the local hospital.
Until the autopsy and lab results were all in. This person had a type of leukemia that is diagnosed about 10 times a year in the United States, and they’ve never come up with a chemotherapy protocol for it because nobody has ever lived long enough for them to devise one. :eek:
A case like that really should be referred to the ME or coroner, whichever is operative in that jurisdiction. However, without any apparent symptoms for, what?, about 72 hours, then suddenly dropping dead, sounds like a “true, true, unrelated” situation. An autopsy would be the only way to sort it out.
Yeah, we’re not going to figger this out her, but in a news story from some years ago, there was a highly publicized case of verterbral artery dissection.
