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Originally Posted by Yorkiemom1  I am also very sad to have to face, yet again, a person that really did not have the "knowledge of an insider in the medical field", has paid for a clinic's gross negligence with her life. And not to approach this from a political angle, but rather to use this example strictly as a teaching moment.....when Rick Perry passes laws that demand that clinics (abortion) have doctors that have hospital affiliation, have specific resuscitative equipment and training for staff members, etc, or they must not be risking womens lives performing abortions, THIS is exactly what he is trying to prevent. I have NO concern about what a woman wants to do as fae as her body is concerned, but I do advocate for patient's that THINK they are safe in clinics. If a clinic is not prepared to provide effective CPR, and if physicians that run the clinic do not have affiliation with a hospital within close proximity to that clinic, any patient that is undergoing procedures in that clinic are at grave risk of loosing their lives in the case of an emergency. You see what happened in Joan's case, and this clinic was close to a hospital....still, it only takes 3 minutes for an untrained staff to fly around in a panic, calling 911, trying to figure out what to do next.....without oxygen, your heart begins to slow...when she had a cardiac arrest, that tells me she was without breath for at least 45 seconds....her heart slowed, then stopped, and I can just imagine these people scrambling around in a panic, waiting for an ambulance to arrive.....this is sooooooo unfortunate. I can imagine she was "on life support", ie a ventillator, and sedated into a medically induced coma....but I would imagine they had already tried to start waking her up, stopped all sedation, and were getting no response, so over the last 3 days they were doing the EEGs to signify zero brain activity. That is when the family was faced with that gut wrenching decision, they moved her to a private room so the family could be with her, and I suspect they removed the ventillator at that time.....and the first trailblazing female comediane of the century, passed on. How tragic....I wish she would have had the information available to her to know if something happens we probably wont be able to resusitate you effectively.....Now, I do hope there is a lawsuit....and I can only imagine how the notes and records at that clinic have already been "adjusted" to try to show no negligence on the part of the clinic. So sad........ |
Heartily agree with everything you've said, including the probable sequence of what happened once they realized she was brain-dead. Once they moved her from ICU without an accompanying statement of her condition being upgraded, I knew. Some of those clinics know nothing about emergency medicine and have nothing to little to offer for a patient in trouble and I wonder at the some of these dentists' offices who practice conscious sedation where the anesthesiologist brings his equipment in a kit into the room with the patient he's about to sedate into unconsciousness!
At the ortho surgeon's office where I worked, during one of our emergency drills, we couldn't get our oxygen to flow(!), even though the regulators were regularly tested, and it was at least four to five minutes until the extra tank was found and fetched back to the room our fake-crashed patient, now certainly a brain-dead fake-dead patient, was in. And we didn't sedate or administer general anesthesia to anyone ever in our clinic! But we just never had a plan in place in case any of the equipment malfunctioned - until then.
I also wonder at the pre-op work-up she got - if that was as thorough as it should have been for someone her age. Then I also heard she was out performing her act at a function the night before her procedure instead of showing up for surgery in an assured rested state.
I sure hope this opens the eyes of people having procedures that anytime you are rendered unconscious, your doctor needs to know you are medically able to withstand the sedation and the procedure and that the facility he's working at has a crash team present, an AED plus all of the frequently tested, working equipment and unexpired drugs needed to efficiently resuscitate a patient who crashes.