A License to Kill

My child tragically lost her life last year at City of Hope hospital, Duarte, CA.  She was admitted to the hospital with an unresolved urinary tract infection   and would die at the hands of the medical staff who can only be described as evil.  Sure there were numerous mistakes made prior to the actions which ended her life but what I am about to tell you was NO MISTAKE. 

On the night before we hoped to be discharged, she was given an enema. Her bowel perforated.  I begged and pleaded for over 9 hours for a surgeon, but the total lack of care and disregard put my daughter in a horrific medical condition which was ignored and dismissed to a point which was not survivable. 

As the hours ticked by, my options became limited. What can you do when you are trapped in a place which is refusing to pick up the phone and call a surgeon?  At my wit’s end, I dialed 911.  The fire department would not come because they said she was already in a hospital and it was not possible. Only after I had made a documented call to 911 did I get them to call the emergency response team. But to my devastation this team abandoned my child, as well.  The call went out overhead and a whole team arrived including an emergency response physician and the hospital administrator.  The nurse who called the team said, “Oh, I only called you because of her mother.” Seemingly to distance herself from making the call. They acknowledged my daughter was in critical condition and left the room.  The physician and hospital administrator went and sat at the nurse’s station.  A surgeon was not called for an additional 2 hours.  This is abandonment! 

It was 9 total hours after the enema before they finally called a surgeon.  When the surgeon arrived she had to intubate my daughter in her hospital bed, as she was barely alive.  My daughter was in respiratory failure, septic, and hemorrhagic shock as she entered surgery. Over those 9 hours all of her bowels died while they let her suffer in pain as I screamed for help.  This was not just one bad apple, this was the entire staff  The treating nurse, charge nurse, doctor on call, emergency response doctor, hospital administrator, etc.

 It was like drowning in slow motion while the lifeguard is swimming just out of reach, with no intention of rescue! 

I am telling her story because if this sadistic hospital staff will do this to a 26 year old young woman they will do it to you, me or anyone else for that matter. 

As a time perspective, my daughter had finished a full semester of school just 3 weeks earlier.  And exactly one month later she would be fighting to keep the hospital staff from killing her. 

You will have to imagine this scene….My daughter’s abdomen became hard and distended within 15 minutes of the enema. So distended, she looked 9 months pregnant and her pain was through the roof.  She was saying, “This is an emergency”, help me!  I immediately went into action, asking for anyone and everyone I could to call a surgeon!  I even asked the two nurses if you don’t have the capability to treat her then help us leave.   I said, “As human beings please help her, she is dying!” The treating RN exclaimed, we have every specialty surgeon there is… And I said, then  CALL THEM!!!! 

I still feel the debilitating emotional pain of a mother who couldn't hold and comfort her dying child because I was fighting with everything I had to get her help.  It should be simple, right?  But Why? Why didn’t they help her?  I am asked that exact question every day.  It’s so hard to believe because it’s their job, it’s a hospital, these people are doctors and nurses and they refused to help save my child’s life. Why? 

We as patients, parents, family and friends enter a hospital in good faith that the staff is indeed in the business of saving lives.   But as I can so horrifically attest, I watched my child die slowly and painfully by the intentional refusal of care.  You are at their mercy and if they do not act, you will die and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.

 I will say this clearly, I tried for over 9 hours to get this hospital staff to call someone to save my child.  I can still feel the coldness, the disdain and lack of caring, it was palpable.  To this day I become nauseated as the flashes of my child’s face, her fading voice, and her legs, mottled, purple and cold from the lack of circulation because the extreme abdominal pressure from her exploded intestines.  Both her legs were without a pulse for 6 or more hours as the pressure compressed the blood flow to her legs. My child was intentionally neglected by this hospital staff in the most torturous way possible.  This hospital proclaims to be the City of Hope.  Then why did they put my child in a “Hopeless” situation which was not survivable?

 If you were shot, bleeding into your abdomen.....would a hospital let you sit for 9 hours slowly dying, then call a trauma surgeon to run with you into surgery in attempts to save you from their hours of neglect? 

I will never understand the cruel intentions of this staff, but I will say the neglect and inhumane torture of my child was the greatest failure of the Hippocratic Oath I have ever seen. Because the # 1 Rule is to DO NO HARM! 

Once you die, you become the voiceless victim.  So, I owe it to my beautiful, kind and caring child to tell her story.  No mother should have to beg for the life of her child while sitting in a hospital!