A nurse has apologised for putting a laughing reaction on the Facebook post of a Khon Kaen woman who died days later.

She wrote it as a reply on the same thread. Channel 3 broadcast the apology on Monday.

“I am the person in the post who pressed the laugh,” she wrote.

“I am truly sorry for doing it, without thinking that what I did might cause anyone distress.”

She said she accepted the blame, and every word of criticism about her professional ethics.

“It came from my own carelessness, from taking in only one side of the story.”

She apologised to the woman who died as well.

“I will improve, and think my actions through more carefully than this. I will carry this fault with me for the rest of my life.”

Her name and face are blurred in the broadcast. The photograph beside the apology shows her in a nurse’s uniform.

It is worth being precise about what she has admitted, because it is narrower than the anger aimed at that thread.

She says she left a laughing reaction. She does not say she wrote any of the comments telling the woman to go home and die.

Those came from other accounts.

The original post came from a woman lying in a hospital bed in Khon Kaen. She had been waiting since midday.

She wrote, in Isan dialect, that if nobody was going to examine her she might as well go home and die.

A large Facebook page picked it up. Comments and laughing reactions followed, and the page that reported the story said most of the accounts belonged to nursing staff.

“If you are in pain and cannot wait, then go home and die,” one wrote.

Days later her son posted that she had died.

She had been found unconscious in the hospital bathroom at about 4am. She had fallen and hit her head, and the bleeding was on the brain.

He asked why she had been allowed to go to the bathroom alone. Visiting hours end at 8pm, and nobody appears to have noticed she was gone until 4am.

Nothing in the comments caused her death.

The fall, and the care she was given on the ward, are separate questions. They are the ones her family is still asking.

The hospital has not been named and has not commented. No investigation has been announced.

The Nursing Council has not said whether it will examine the conduct of any of the accounts involved.

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Sources: Channel 3 · Daily News · Kapook

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