Posted on 11/23/2008 8:10:18 PM PST by Coleus
She went to a Brooklyn emergency room suffering from what she thought was just a kidney stone, but a medical nightmare left her partly blind and a quadruple amputee. Tabitha Mullings claims doctors at Brooklyn Hospital Center failed to diagnose an infection that has literally eaten her alive.
"Sometimes I can't believe it's me laying here," the mother of three told the Daily News Wednesday from her bed in the very hospital she blames for her ravaged body. Wiping tears with a bandaged stump, Mullings struggled to explain how in a little more than a month she has gone from vibrant mom to a shell-shocked victim dependent on relatives to feed her. "At first I didn't want to live anymore, but I've got three kids and I'm their mother and their father," Mullings, 32, said. A spokesman for the hospital failed to respond to requests for comment. Mullings and her lawyers plan to hit the hospital with a medical malpractice suit today in Brooklyn Supreme Court.
"I'm angry at the people in the emergency room," Mullings said. "I don't think they did their job." Her agonizing ordeal began Sept. 14, when she went to the Fort Greene emergency room in pain. Doctors diagnosed it as a kidney stone. Lawyer Sanford Rubenstein said Mullings was given painkillers and sent home. "They needed to admit her to the hospital, not send her home with pain medication," Rubenstein said. "She needed to be worked up much more thoroughly, not discharged."
When the pain intensified, Mullings dialed 911 twice in 24 hours, but medics determined she did not need to be hospitalized, she said. On Sept. 15, Mullings' fiancé rushed her back to Brooklyn Hospital Center, where the sepsis infection became not only obvious but full-blown. The infection quickly choked off blood flow to her extremities and her right optic nerve, and she lapsed into a semicoma that lasted two weeks. "I woke up with black feet and black hands," Mullings said. Grappling to get the infection under control, doctors were forced to amputate both her feet and hands. The infection rendered her blind in her right eye. Mullings said that just a week before her catastrophic illness took hold, she passed the state court officers exam and was looking forward to a career as a civil servant.
Now, battling depression, her dream is to someday walk again with the use of prosthetics and to be a helpful mother again to her three sons - Charles, 14; Enrique, 12, and Matthew, 9. "I don't want anyone to feel sorry for me," said Mullings, who is expected to be transferred by the end of the week to the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine in Manhattan. "I believe in taking negatives and turning them into positives." She is not alone in her fight. Her brother, aunt and grandmother split shifts around the clock feeding her and holding up glasses of water for her to drink. "She is a woman who shows amazing strength and courage in her determination to live as normal a life as possible," Rubenstein said.
poor thing, what a shame.
These super infections can be incredibly hard to diagnosis and can spread like wildfire ....scary stuff....
do your best to stay healthy, cause this is only going to get worse. OMG, how horrifying for this woman.
May GOD be with Her and Bless her and All of Us!
In the old days we had a belief that if you go to a hospital you were not coming home.
She is too young and was quite nice looking to be Boxing Helena now.
I hope with good care and Gods love she can overcome what she now has to live with.
God help her.
Yeah.
I was just thinking the other day on how the med. establishment will use one patient as a trophy of thier good will and well this case of her losing all her limbs and no one in the med. establishment will step up and give her the rehab she will need to thrive. (oh something like that)
Poor woman. I wish I knew of a charity to donate to for prosthetics. I mean good ones. No hands to touch her babies...
Oh, my heart is breaking for her.
OMG, she will be in my prayers. What an ordeal. It’s just hard to fathom.
Within her lifetime it should be possible to grow new limbs using stem cells. It would happen a lot sooner if the govt would stop throwing money away on AIDS and invest it in repairing limb and spinal cord injuries.
Word on the street is that she is a crack head who abandoned her children so that she could be free to party all the time. She did not inform her caregivers of her drug addiction and it brought about complications. Had she been honest, the doctors could possibly have treated her differently.
She looks awfully plump and healthy for a crack addict in that “before” photo. She’s probably no angel, but if it’s true that she’d just passed the court officer’s exam, it would appear that was making a reasonable effort to be responsible and self-supporting (even if she hadn’t necessarily done so in the past).
She has MRSA and so do I and it can kill you faster then you can even begin to imagine.
You probably know it better by it’s media name “The Flesh Eating Bacteria”. 37% of all Americans that get it, die from MRSA because it isn’t stopped in time.
I wish you a full and speedy recovery. I have read that the odds of contracting MRSA shoot up signifigantly when you enter a hospital, as if it thrives in that environment.
So far I’m OK but I dread every cut or sore and watch them for the slightest chance that they want to spread like wildfire.
Her trip to the hospital probably did it, and she is lucky to be alive. I had my right leg infected at my right knee and was lucky to get treatment before it became so serious that they would have had to amputate.
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