Mother mistakenly receives letter from Faro hospital saying her son died

An Algarve mother received “heartfelt condolences” and was invited by the Centro Hospitalar Universitário do Algarve to pray for her son last week, after he supposedly died on the paediatric ward. However, Sandra Portela was left very confused, since her two-year-old boy is alive and well.

“It is surreal that they tell a mother that her child is dead. Such mistakes are gross and cannot happen,” said Sandra Portela. The surreal nature of this story is even greater than one might think though as this was, in the space of a week, the second unusual situation Ms. Portela and her child had involving the hospital. The previous week, during a visit to the paediatric emergency room, she was informed that according to hospital records the boy had died on 22 January.

After the boy was assisted at the hospital and the confusion subsided, the family thought the situation had been overcome, however last Friday Ms. Portela received a letter from the Centro Hospitalar Universitário do Algarve (CHUA) that left her “gobsmacked”.

“It was in this hospital that your loved one spent the last moments of their existence, we come to invite you to pray with us”, reads the letter from the Spiritual and Religious Assistance service at the hospital.

The hospital assumes that it was a registration error at the time of clinical discharge and that it was corrected in the system on the day of the new admission. As for the letter, they explain that it was sent before the mistake was detected and has already apologized to the family. I’m sure many of us can relate to the feeling of having died twice in a week, usually waking up on a Monday.