Even the Morgue Has a Waitlist with Galen Laserson, MD
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What triggered Galen’s midnight call and why did it matter?
At the Nocturinous, we are careful to ensure that all stories comply with healthcare privacy laws. Details may have been changed to ensure patient confidentiality. All views expressed are those of the person speaking and not their employer.
When a patient dies in the hospital, I pronounce him dead. Comfort the family. switch off the monitors, pull the curtain shut, and then move on to my next job. But the story doesn't end there. What happens to the patient's body next? I'm Emily Silverman and this is The Nocturnists, stories about what it's like to work in medicine. In this episode, hospital administrator Galen Laserson recounts the time she got an unexpected phone call in the middle of the night, which prompted her to learn all about the hospital's underbelly. The morgue. Afterward, we talk about the world of hospital administration and then end with a surprising piece of news about Galen's career path. Here is her story.
So I'd like you to remember the first time that your pager went off. Where were you? How did you feel? What was the call? For me, it was one thirty in the morning on a Wednesday, and I was dead asleep. And I jolted awake in my bed and I grabbed the pager and I started pushing buttons frantically, trying to read the message and terrified that I would delete it. So every week a hospital executive serves as the administrator on call, the AOC, responsible for managing any major operational issues or crises that come up.
How did the broken morgue refrigerator become an emergency?
For the most part, the AOC pager doesn't go off that frequently. Most departments, IT facilities, nursing, let's say, handle issues on their own or with some help from the on-site hospital supervisor. For an issue to get to the AOC, something's gone awry. This is the management equivalent of multi-system organ failure. So As you'd expect, we debrief after every call to make sure that the issues don't repeat themselves. So as a new fellow in hospital administration, the only thing I could be certain of when I answered a page was that it would be something I had never dealt with before. So we're back to Wednesday at one thirty AM and I return the page and I say this is Galen Lasserson, first responder AOC.
What seems to be the problem? And um And then the hospital supervisor tells me the refrigerator's broken. I think. Okay. I think that that doesn't seem like such a big deal. Um which refrigerator? And she tells me The morgue. Lesson number one The morgue is a fridge, not a freezer. Um now They didn't cover this one in business school. So I I start with a strategy that my friend Nicole swears got her through her intern year. I see now What do you normally do when that happens? No luck. Moritz's been trucking along just fine for about fifteen years, and as an added bonus, the hospital supervisor now thinks I'm incompetent. So when in doubt, it's always a good idea to start with nursing. And I call the nursing supervisor and I say, you know, we have a bit of a situation.
This might be hard, but If you had to estimate how many people do you think we might, you know, like lose tonight?
What math did Galen use to predict the morgue’s temperature rise?
And uh she says, tonight, pretty matter-of factly, uh, one, Mr. James on the 13th floor. Wow, okay, that was specific. So um, got it. Need room for Mr. James. But even more pressing was what we were going to do with the body that was coming. out of organ harvesting shortly. This was like a macabre math problem. Did I want one very warm body in the morgue ante room plus sixteen cool ones in the morgue refrigerator? Or did I open the door and land myself with seventeen lukewarm bodies? Well, I said to the nursing supervisor, I mean so like What if we open the door and we just put the body in really, really quickly? And it wasn't the most scientific approach, but it didn't seem any worse than any other option we had.
So with that covered, I called facilities and pathology and we agreed on a morning meeting in the morgue to come up with a plan. So the next morning I arrive at the morgue a little early because I you know, I was awake. I went and looked at the morgue refrigerator and it uh temperature had gone up by about six degrees and I was back at the math.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What triggered Galen’s midnight call and why did it matter?
0:00–1:43
2
How did the broken morgue refrigerator become an emergency?
1:43–3:45
3
What math did Galen use to predict the morgue’s temperature rise?
3:45–7:22
4
How did the team decide where to place the incoming bodies?
7:22–12:37
5
What does the morgue actually look like inside?
12:37–18:15
6
How are families and paperwork handled after a death?
18:15–22:07
7
What lessons were learned from the debrief and the emergency manual?
22:07–27:06
8
Why did Galen ultimately choose to go to medical school?
27:06–29:48