Yesterday in the TN murder trial of nurse Sharron Chason, a nurse tending to the comatose Mr. Chason testified that the defendant told him (the nurse) not to give out information about the patient’s condition to visitors. A friend of the patient also testified that Mrs. Chason was not crying when he visited the hospital room. Both were witnesses for the prosecution—supposedly damning testimony.

Having stood by the bedside of a dying relative—without crying—and having tried to stop hospital workers from giving out information about the patient to non-family visitors, I must side with Mrs. Chason, even if she is responsible for her husband’s death (which has not yet been proven).

First, a loving person does not cry during such a crisis. Your tears come much later.

Second, if this sad, stressful situation ever happens to you, I think you may be shocked by the way hospital workers—especially nurses—behave.

Sick Room Visits from Strangers and Busybodies

There is no such thing as hospital security.

Recently, much has been made of the right of spouses to attend the bedside of spouses as opposed to the supposed prohibition against domestic partners attending the bedside. But hospitals let anyone and everyone into a sick room, even into intensive care. At most, a visitor must ring a bell or knock on the door.

In many instances anyone can simply walk into a hospital off the street and into any part of a hospital they choose.

Sidebar: It’s a wonder more babies aren’t stolen out of the nursery. In fact, lax hospital security is ripe for fiction: I’ve often thought about writing a murder mystery in which a killer simply walks into a hospital room and commits a murder in some clever way—like administering unnecessary diabetes medicine to an already comatose person, because she’s angry that he inherited the family fortune.

Once a visitor is at the bedside of a dying person, she is continually addressed by nurses and orderlies who express their opinions of the patient’s condition, treatment, and prognosis. The witness-nurse in the Chason trial, for example, who claimed nurses are only permitted to say the obvious to a visitor may have been telling the truth about the policy, but not about the practice.

In my experience, I tried to stop nurses from telling visitors false information, which those people then took outside the hospital and repeated to other people—many of whom eventually believed my dying relative was on the road to recovery.

The Jury

I’m struck by the essential unfairness of this testimony against Ms. Chason. The nurse who testified against her was clearly trying to make himself look good and knew no one could contradict him. The visiting friend also may have had cause to want to deflect suspicion from himself that from time to time he offered drugs to the deceased.

How will the jury view this? Must jurors have had experiences similar to mine to find this testimony as meaningless and mean-spirited as I do?