Late one evening, Dawn Berry took a call from her grandmother’s nursing home. Her grandmother had been found unresponsive in bed. What should they do?
Dawn, who was then 43, had worked in the medical field for more than 20 years in her hometown of Oklahoma City. When her grandmother had a severe stroke at home a few months earlier, Dawn’s aunts and uncles authorized her to make medical decisions. Now she made another: Send Grandma to the emergency room.
Dawn arrived around 9 p.m. Awake most of the night coordinating care, she was talking to a doctor about her grandmother – who was having complications from the stroke – when Dawn felt the room start spinning. By now it was around 5 a.m. She blamed the episode on stress…