Posted on 03/30/2012 10:54:35 AM PDT by Sopater
RICHMOND HEIGHTS • Anna Brown wasn't leaving the emergency room quietly.
She yelled from a wheelchair at St. Mary's Health Center security personnel and Richmond Heights police officers that her legs hurt so badly she couldn't stand.
She had already been to two other hospitals that week in September, complaining of leg pain after spraining her ankle.
This time, she refused to leave.
A police officer arrested Brown for trespassing. He wheeled her out in handcuffs after a doctor said she was healthy enough to be locked up.
Brown was 29. A mother who had lost custody of two children. Homeless. On Medicaid. And, an autopsy later revealed, dying from blood clots that started in her legs, then lodged in her lungs.
She told officers she couldn't get out of the police car, so they dragged her by her arms into the station. They left her lying on the concrete floor of a jail cell, moaning and struggling to breathe. Just 15 minutes later, a jail worker found her cold to the touch.
Officers suspected Brown was using drugs. Autopsy results showed she had no drugs in her system.
(Excerpt) Read more at stltoday.com ...
laying on a cold floor.
My heart goes out to this woman (posthumously) and her family. She fought for her life, but her pleas fell on arrogant and purposefully deaf ears. It seems they judged her on her social status and maybe race.
My three year old grandson from a white, middle-class family has spina bifida, which contributes to many potentially dangerous conditions. A moderate fever or slight behavior change can indicate a serious urinary tract infection. His kidneys are already badly scarred from undiagnosed and untreated infections.
His Mom has been right on top of each incident, and gets him to a specialist ASAP, but the few days it takes for the process each time he
gets symptoms put him at risk for more damage.
Docs aren’t omnipotent. Things don’t always go by their presumptions. They should consider that the Medicaid Mom or the young- looking blonde Mom might know what they’re talking about. At least consider.
Docs aren’t omnipotent. Things don’t always go by their presumptions. They should consider that the Medicaid Mom or the young- looking blonde Mom might know what they’re talking about. At least consider.
Think about that awhile.......................
Disgraceful what happened to her, and it would take a ‘coldness of heart’ to think otherwise.
My own grandmother lay in bed one night with terrible pain in one leg. It was a blood clot and she ended up losing her leg.
RIP.
BTW that Doc who said she was healthy enough to be put in jail is gonna need to find a new job cuz he will never find someone to sell him malpractice insurance now.
Possibly because you are aware, as am I, that pain in the legs and inability to move them correctly are a sign of blood clots. It could have been something else but for the doctors not to heed these symptoms and run an MRI on her is criminal. The biggest danger of blood clots of any area is their breaking loose and going to the lungs to form a pulmonary embolism, almost a certain death sentence.
It doesn’t take me long to think of the implications of that statement. I hope your mother is still alive and well.
On a Monday, my 89 year old Dad, an engineer, WWII vet and author was fine. The next day he had severe leg pains and elected to go to the ER, where they determined he was having a heart attack. After a couple days in ICU, where he couldn’t sleep, they deemed him (the magic words) agitated and suffering from dementia. This enabled them to medicate him at the nurses’ discretion. He was “full code,” which he wanted to be, and had given his medical proxy to me, in case he was incapacitated. I had to spend a good portion of each day wrangling with docs and nurses, who just wanted him to take the happy drops and slip away.
Over the weekend, he got the attention of a student nurse and told her his life’s story. God bless the young lady, who listened to him and told the other nurses. They scoffed at her, as they fully believed he had the dementia they’d noted on his chart a few days before.
When I came in the next morning, the student nurse told me of her interesting evening with my Dad and asked in front of the other nurses if the stories were true. Yes, of course. All of them. The nurses’ jaws dropped.
Each day was still a challenge with them all, and they never stopped hounding me to end his life, using their euphemisms, of course.
He had his heart attack on Obama’s inauguration day, and he died two weeks later. I’m still traumatized by the struggles with the hospital staff during that time. It cost us spending our remaining time together in the way we wished, at the very least.
This woman had 8 or 9 siblings who are now demanding answers. Where were they when their poor sister was alive and needed them? Why, with such a large family, was she homeless? These so-called siblings deserve as much if not more blame for the woman's death as the doctor who cleared her for being arrested.
There have been some comments here about “drug seeking behavior.” In 1995, when I was 40 years old, I sought treatment at the local Catholic hospital for lower back pain. I was given a pain shot and turned out. I went back a few days later begging for more than just a pain shot. I was told that another doctor said I didn’t have health insurance, and was asked to leave, I don’t remember if I got a pain shot or not. A few days later I was back, this time armed with an Rx to receive an IVP to rule out kidney stones. I was consequently admitted for four days and receive treatment for kidney stones. I was fully covered from the beginning with my husband’s IBEW insurance.
The doctor in the E.R. treated me like a drug seeker; like SH*T. It’s standard operating procedure. There’s just a profile, and as a 40 year old married woman, I guess I fit it. Maybe I wasn’t dressed well enough, or didn’t have on my makeup. Maybe my wedding rings weren’t impressive enough. I felt like hell and was barely functional. Doctors are ridged and the most discriminatory people walking the face of the earth. One of them is going to kill me someday.
Oh, and the hospital have the nerve to charge me for the first two E.R. visits. A well-written letter (something about malpractice pain and suffering, etc.) got those charges reversed.
The outer layers of tissues lose their heat quickly but the inner core takes time...trust me as an RN for 25 years, the outer layers lose their heat quickly. When ME’s detirmine time of death they do a core liver temp.
But there's a saying in medicine, even scam artists get sick. So ALWAYS address the problem. Terrible for this patient and her family.
Having been on Medicaid until recently, I am not surprised at all by this report. Medicaid recipients are often treated like dirt and even more often not treated at all. Sometimes it’s the same thing.
MRI is not indicted for the symptoms described.
I absolutely LOVE that question... :-)
That's because you presume you know the answer.
But you don't.
I hope the headache thing got resolved. Headaches can ruin a person’s life.
LOL - Why be so cagey about a position you state you "absolutely LOVE"? It doesn't sound like you have any waffling over what you mean. So why not just say it?
Because it's not like it's mysterious, you know. There are only two choices - her lack of family help counts against her, or it counts against her family. Now why would you "absolutely LOVE" such a question? Because you presume you know the answer, of course. And, as people rarely presume that a single person has been driven to the street by an entire family being wrong, it's obvious that that is probably what you "absolutely LOVE" about the question - that it implies she wasn't as innocent as the article makes her out to be.
But you know all of this, of course. That's why it stung you so hard when I told you not to presume - because you did presume. And you don't have enough information to presume.
The fact is that it takes a great deal of courage to stand up to a dysfunctional family, and families are very often dysfunctional to the extremes of actual abuse - whether over drug use, religious abuse, money abuse, interpersonal relationship abuse, or whatever. And typically, families gang up against whistleblowers - or even those who dare to challenge the consensus.
On the other hand, families also lose members to individual bad choices, it's true. But ask yourself - what is more likely - that a truly loving and supportive family will lose a member who cries abuse, or that an abusive family in denial will lose a amember that cries abuse? You see, the quick presumption doesn't really hold up to examination. because a family is a very powerful thing, and so a truly loving family is also a very loving thing. If most families were as truly loving as they claim to be, far less people would flee them and end up in drugs,or crime, or on the street. In fact, that's the very purpose of a loving family - to have enough strength to help their members avoid such fates.
So I say, don't presume. This woman may well have died facing the same indifference to her suffering and real danger to her life, as she did from a family that she fled from in the first place. Perhaps not, it's true - but there is certainly a very strong argument to be made on her behalf, lacking any further information about her.
In any event, she's in a better place now, no matter how horribly she had to leave here.
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