35 Creepy Last Words Uttered by Patients Before Dying as Shared by Doctors and Nurses

Working in health care will teach you that death is inevitable. You’ll be one of those few people to know how life starts and how it will end.

1. “But I don’t know how to get there…” Grandpa in hospice. Hadn’t spoken in days. Died about two hours later.

2. Not a doctor but I overheard an old lady whisper this to her old husband dying of kidney problems.

“You are going to beat this, you got away with murder, this is nothing.”

3. I work in a cardiac ICU. We had a patient who had a pulmonary artery rupture (a rare, but known complication of a Swan-Ganz catheter).

One minute he was joking around with us and the next bright red blood was spewing out of his mouth. His last words before he died were “why is this happening to me?”

It still haunts me years later.

4. Nurse here – had a patient come into the ER with shortness of breath. He started deteriorating in the ER, and then quite rapidly on the transport up the ICU.

We got him wheeled into his room, replaced the ER lines and tubes with our own, and transferred him from the transport stretcher to his ICU bed.

He actually did most of the transfer himself. He didn’t say anything, but just before he died he pleasantly adjusted his own pillow, laid his head down, and then his eyes went blank. This man just made himself comfortable before laying down to die.

5. I’m a nurse and was previously working at an assisted living community on the dementia/Alzheimer’s unit.

My very favorite patient had been declining pretty steadily so I was checking on him very frequently. We would have long chats and joke around with each other, but in the last two weeks of his life, he stopped talking completely and didn’t really acknowledge conversation directed at him at all.

I finished my medication rounds for the evening and went to see him before I left. I told him I was leaving for the night and that I’d see him the following day, and he looked me in the eyes and smiled SO genuinely and said, “You look like an angel.” I thought it was so sweet because he had not seemed lucid in weeks.

He died the next morning. It really messed with me.