Posted on 05/20/2007 10:52:28 AM PDT by John Jorsett
In the emergency room at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, Edith Isabel Rodriguez was seen as a complainer.
"Thanks a lot, officers," an emergency room nurse told Los Angeles County police who brought in Rodriguez early May 9 after finding her in front of the Willowbrook hospital yelling for help. "This is her third time here."
The 43-year-old mother of three had been released from the emergency room hours earlier, her third visit in three days for abdominal pain. She'd been given prescription medication and a doctor's appointment.
Turning to Rodriguez, the nurse said, "You have already been seen, and there is nothing we can do," according to a report by the county office of public safety, which provides security at the hospital.
Parked in the emergency room lobby in a wheelchair after police left, she fell to the floor. She lay on the linoleum, writhing in pain, for 45 minutes, as staffers worked at their desks and numerous patients looked on.
Aside from one patient who briefly checked on her condition, no one helped her. A janitor cleaned the floor around her as if she were a piece of furniture. A closed-circuit camera captured everyone's apparent indifference.
Arriving to find Rodriguez on the floor, her boyfriend unsuccessfully tried to enlist help from the medical staff and county police — even a 911 dispatcher, who balked at sending rescuers to a hospital.
Alerted to the "disturbance" in the lobby, police stepped in — by running Rodriguez's record. They found an outstanding warrant and prepared to take her to jail. She died before she could be put into a squad car.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
I have no idea how it occurred. That is all the article stated.....big perforation in the large bowel.
I would think perontonitis would be the actual death. I had a sister who died of that after child birth because of a perforation in her lower intestine.
“Free” health care guarantees this sort of thing will keep on happening. If there was no such thing as free health care, if people were charged for services rendered, and only had catastrophic health insurance, then people would only go to the hospital for care when they were really sick. No one, espically someone who can’t pay, would request medical care they didn’t need if they knew they would be billed for it. Then, when people came in complaining of pain, the doctors and hospitals would take them seriously.
What would be your take on the paper’s claim that a perforation can cause sudden death? Absent a hemmorhage, that is?
I’m going to wait for the autopsy, though, if it doesn’t confirm the Times tale, it’ll end being run on a back page, if at all. My money’s on a pre-existing heart time-bomb set off by her reaction to the pain.
Having worked in a busy ER for a number of years, I can relate to the frustration of health care providers with people who make multiple presentations when they have nothing seriously wrong with them.
I have experienced many situations where these same people have presented with an acute medical problem. If we had handled them in the the same manner as this poor lady, many would have probably met their demise, as she did.
I do emphasize with the frustration of providing medical care for illegal aliens,but they are after all, human beings that deserve some caring and compassion.
Yes I agree, you are heartless.
That’s horrible, but what pisses me off is that honest, responsible people who really need help urgently, often don’t get it because the emergency rooms and hospital wards are overwhelmed with scammers and criminals and people who have self-inflicted their ailments. Yes, it’s possible that this woman wasn’t “garbage”, but she did have an arrest warrant out for her. Probably no angel. And we have no information about how many other patients with urgent life-threatening conditions the ER staff was dealing with while they left her on the floor.
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Gotta agree with that....pretty well sums it up.
“They just assume that anyone with a Hispanic name is an illegal alien.”
That and they have extremely poor reading comprehension or are too lazy to read at all. The article clearly states that she was a California native.
FR seems to have attracted a large group of posters that are hostile to anyone Hispanic, regardless of whether they are legal or not. I am glad to know that it bothers someone other than me. Ignorance is not a conservative value.
It’s disgusting, ignorant bigotry.
I spent part of my youth working as an ambulance dispatcher. We also had several doctors on our switchboard. There was one patient who always called at two am, demanding to talk to her doctor. She was always in extreme pain, though the location varied from call to call, and she was always ‘on the verge of death’. When I offered an ambulance, though, she’d always decline, and... after half an hour on the phone... all her symptoms would disappear and she’d start getting ‘frisky’.
Talked to her almost every night for six months. My replacement was still taking her calls a year later.
“A family member who was a paramedic used to joke about HHS, Hispanic Hysterical Syndrome, because any ailment, no matter how minor, would bring out a grandmother who would throw herself on the street weeping and screaming. So the hospital probably wrote this woman off.”
I will grant you that some Hispanics tend to be very emotional. A few can be emotional in the extreme.
Hopefully your family member paramedic also told you that it is relatively easy to tell if someone is truly in pain or not. Blood pressure and heart rate should do it. If you can’t do that, you can always watch their feet for a few minutes. Someone in severe pain can’t keep their feet still. They will keep moving them, trying to find a position to aleviate the pain. Have worked in paremedic/firefighting for years. Seen more than my share of drugseekers, and fakes. Most of us are fairly confident in our ability to assess pain. (children can be a little trickier, they tend to be very quiet when they are in pain)
No way the hospital avoids liablity here. ER docs or triage nurse is responsible, unless there is something major left out of the article.
Thank you, they recovered after 6 weeks of IV antibiotics, this was 4 years ago and no relapses
It’s just that I have a heart for people who are reasonably responsible members of society, or who are so profoundly disabled through no fault of their own (or so young) that they must be completely dependent on others. It’s not that I have no feelings of compassion whatsoever for the rest, but it’s getting really scary in hospitals, where responsible people are routinely killed by delays and errors, many of which wouldn’t have happened if there weren’t such huge resources being diverted to scammers, criminals, etc.
Nobody should be left writhing in pain (including the woman in this story). We can easily afford morphine drips for everybody. But we certainly don’t need to be giving heart transplants to convicted murderers, and there are plenty of less extreme examples where we should be able to out people at the back of the line, or even out of the line altogether. Like gangbangers who assault ER staff. The medical profession should have more heart for its own staff, and for the patched up gangbangers’ next victims, and for the responsible people waiting for urgent medical care, than for the gangbangers. Failure to make choices like these is resulting in a medical care system that is so overstressed and broken that patients like the one in this story don’t even a get a morphine drip to keep them comfortable while they die.
Have you really thought through the implications of this? That you give half as careful a work-up to people who behave in a civilized manner, because you've spent your time giving double (read: thorough) care to people who are being belligerent and making false accusations against the hospital staff? Gee, maybe I should keep that in mind next time I land in an ER. To get a really thorough work-up, I should scream and yell, be disruptive, make false accusations against the staff . . . even though I'd much rather be courteous and civilized.
What would be your take on the paper’s claim that a perforation can cause sudden death? Absent a hemmorhage, that is?
A perforated intestine could cause a very serious infection very fast, but not sudden. If this woman had come to the ER 3 times in 24 to 48 hours, that sounds like it would fit. I think the "suddenly" probably reflects the reporter's hazy knowledge of medicine.
“If yer not a WASP”........
Underneath the comments made about this and other stories, though, is real concern about how each of us will actually pay in $$ and cents for those who don’t pay into any medical insurance system now or in the foreseeable future. Somewhere I heard a statistic that, counting fire, police, water, sanitation and medical costs, the bill comes to somewhere under $20,000/year on average for every person here illegally, making our income needs higher.
Now, on the other hand, no one, and I do mean no one, even wants to think of the kind of callousness and cruelty that occurred in this situation for this woman, or, for the paraplegic man left with a broken colostomy bag by the side of the road in LA. These are horrific cases.
I never wanted in my youth to think that money would buy off these and other ills. Instead the ills themselves have gotten worse. In VA and other hospitals, for example, you hear about amputating the wrong leg, etc., or that a veteran would be contacted for restitution payment of $8,000 for some medical error.
Who would receive the transplant, the chemo or dialysis, the premie care or back surgery under a nationalized system? How would these decisions be made and by whom? Where would research dollars come from and to what interests would they be directed? How would a nationalized system compare with the federal operations of, say, the post office, VA or Social Security in its handling of services and funds?
I am a WASP, yes. I have also learned to my chagrin that you do get what you pay for in every case. My idealistic nature has run hard against the practicalities of details, and it is those details that cause me concern. In short, bias or prejudice notwithstanding, the concerns that underlie these almost unbelievable injustices are expressions of undeniable and difficult decisions we have to make before they are made for us.
While I certainly don't advocate a transplant for a condemned murderer, I think it's a very slippery slope to decide who is worthy of emergency care and who should be denied care. And we all know those kind of lists have errors - I wouldn't want to live with the consequences of being misled by an error on the list. And finally, some people who have scammed, mistreated ER personnel, and are responsible for their own illness have also gone on to redeem themselves later in life. You may want to judge who deserves care, but I certainly don't.
I just reread your post - I didn’t say I gave them “double care.” I do think about it more, though. As in stopping to ask myself “is there something more I would do if I didn’t dislike this person?”
Point of order . . . the story refers to the “Willowbrook hospital,” small H. The MLK hospital gets a capital H.
I don’t know the geography, but I wonder if Willowbrook is the area MLKHH is in, and she was in front of it and police brought her inside.
I completely agree with you. :-)
Assuming is bad way to go - we have a couple in our church with a very Spanish sounding name (Garcia)- and the parents and kids are all blonde hair, with blue eyes, and the family has been in the country for several generations. I have a student with the last name of Jones - yep, you guessed it, Hispanic.
Assuming this turns out to be true (and that can be a big assumption) every one that came in contact with her should be fired and sued to the last dime in their pockets, from the doctors, the nurses, the police, even the janitor. The hospital probably should close if it houses such insanely hard-hearted people as to let a woman writhe in agony and die in front of them. I don’t care if it was her 10th time that night - she was a human being deserving of respect and care.
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