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 ...
Yeah...I mean there are on DUTY DOCTORS WHO SHOULD HAVE really looked at this patient....
(not yelling at any-one...just making a point as a 20 year RN who has seen this type of crap in the ER’s of the hospitals I have worked at. It makes my job as an ICU RN more difficult when the families of these patients are in a cranky mood from the treatment they got in our “front end”!)
It's exactly from that movie. Scott's character does in a doctor by giving him some condition that is fatal but treatable (poisoning maybe? I forget), then parking his unconscious body in the ER where he's "ignored to death."
It doesn’t sound like the patient ever got past the triage nurse - can’t blame the doctors for that.
I like the part in that movie where they took out the wrong kidney of a patient and the patient demands being released from the hospital.
George C. Scott says, “You mean we removed the wrong kidney? Yeah, we better release him before we kill him.”
The other part that made me laugh is when he looks out of his window supposedly contemplating what is happening and screams. “We heal nothing! We cure nothing!”
Why do you think she is illegal ...
do you have ANY evidence to back up your claim?
“...never set the broken bones!!!”
Holy freaking crap! Sorry for the language, but that is just unbelievable.
I hope he is OK now.
To true ...
and sadly to often here
It's time for YouTube.
They just assume that anyone with a Hispanic name is an illegal alien. I wonder how many of them are aware that there are Californians of SPANISH descent whose ancestors were American citizens BEFORE the ancestors of many Americans of Irish, Italian, German and eastern European descent.
I worked with a fellow ER nurse who traveled to LA and worked in a county hospital. She said that there was definitely a 2 tier healthcare system out there. If you were uninsured, it was to the back of the bus for you!
This is truly a believable story and shame on the nurse and other patients who ignored this poor woman!
Yeah, fortunately the SOB is better. :<)
Ya can’t dislike anyone enough to want them to suffer like that. First they weren’t going to let my kids take him out of there. My daughter isn’t pleasant when she’s mad!
Shhhh....
Don’t you know the to many on FR if yer not a WASP yer not a real ‘merican.......
Bingo! That was the problem, IMHO. There are those in medicine that don't have an "open mind," so to speak. Once they dismissed her, they just thought she was being a hypochondriac.
A friend of mine's mom went to the ER complaining of pain in her left arm. Unfortunately she had been to the same ER before to be treated for anxiety. So they sent her home (no EKG or other tests) with some anti-anxiety meds and some vicodin. She went home, took a nap, and never woke up, she died from a massive coronary. Needless to say, the family didn't even have to sue for malpractice, the hospital offered a settlement.
Triage, working its magic once again, allocating scarce medical resources to maximum benefit of all.
Perhaps, the medical resources would not be so scarce, were the rules for admission to this country in the first place not so blithely ignored.
This woman was crowded out by the inability of supply of medical services to keep up with the demand for same.
Precisely because the emergency services are too cheap for the applicants for whom this service is provided, and funding is unavailable from other sources.
That and the belief that emergency rooms should just allow people to die if they have a Hispanic name. (And for the record, my ancestry is about 90% Irish with the remainder being English and Scottish.)
Call me heartless, but I’ll back the hospital staff here. Many of our nation’s emergency rooms, and especially the public hospital ERs, are overrun with people demanding free care for self-inflicted ailments, gangbangers demanding to be patched up so they can go out and gangbang some more, people demanding prescription drugs for non-medical reasons, and on and on. It’s little wonder hospital staff get so overwhelmed and jaded that they just ignore somebody lying on the ER floor writhing and howling in pain.
Note that the article doesn’t mention why there was a warrant out for this woman’s arrest. This woman was a fugitive from the law, and yet expected the same law to force other people to pay for and deliver prompt and effective medical treatment for her.
There urgently needs to be a protocol for putting these people on a “no treatment” list as far as regular hospitals are concerned. They should be in prison or a mental hospital, not clogging emergency rooms and hospital beds that have long lines of legitimate patients to treat. Put them on a morphine drip if they appear to be in agonizing pain, call the police to get them out of there, and let a judge determine based on their past record, whether they go to a prison or a mental hospital. Don’t give them any other options. If they die in route, tough. Their death is very likely to be offset by somebody else surviving who otherwise wouldn’t have, as hospital staff are freed up and better able to provide prompt life-saving treatment and avoid deadly errors.
Good for you. The article says this lady had been there 3 times in 3 days. It sounds as if she had a history of gallstones. If she ever got past the triage nurse in any of her three visits the ER doctor should have at minimum checked out her gallbladder and appendix. I'm very curious about her treatment on her prior two visits. A perforated bowel would have shown free fluid on a CT and if treated emergently she might still be alive.
For some reason, the autopsy did not determine a cause of death... I find that amazing. If it were a gallstone leading to pancreatitis, or shot through and perforated the bowel... they couldn’t miss that.
Diag. gallstones, by deduction, Xrays or scans?
I wish I knew if the meds were acid to dissolve the stones (if chol.), if she got a shot earlier directly into the site to dissolve them, or if she only got pain meds. If she was dehydrated (did they hook her up to IVs before, doesn’t seem they sent her to an ICU either), was she jaundiced (did they give Vit. K), nausea, fever? Was she constipated (a la Crohn’s, hence a lot worse), or the opposite?
I can’t find the tox yet from the autopsy... will link when found.
I find this story hard to believe.”
Have you been to a county hospital for emergency treatment recently?
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