I am here to tell the story of my mother, who was an absolutely lovely, caring person, and did not deserve what happened to her.
Long before my mom got Covid, I told her if you get sick, stay out of the hospital, and whatever you do, never ever go on a ventilator.
The back story prior to hospital – Christmas of 2021. Most people in my family got Covid within a week of each other. Covid was ripping through my area, so even though we were not all together on Christmas, most of us got it regardless. My mom called me to on Jan 1st to tell me she had a fever and she thought she had covid. I told her to continue taking the vitamins and supplements she had been taking in advance, and that I would work on getting some ivermectin.
In the mean time, I called around asking for monoclonal anti bodies but everyone around us stopped doing it. My sister called my mom’s doctor, and she would not help at all. All she prescribed was Tylenol, like that would actually do anything to help her.
About 5 days had past, and that night my mom collapsed in the kitchen from being so weak, so my sister called the ambulance and they brought her to the local hospital. I called them right away and said that we do not want her on remdesivir, and they said ok.
Later that night at like 2 a.m., the hospital called me and said they gave my mom some IV fluids and said they were discharging her. My husband got her and I felt relieved at that point thinking she must be ok if they let her go home so fast.
The next 2 days, I called her and told her to take her supplements 3 times a day and she told me she was too weak to do it, and my sister was sick as well so she wasn’t able to help as much as she could have. I went over that night with food and tea, and she was shaking and very weak. I fed her food but she was not able to eat that much. That night my sister called the ambulance because my mom was getting worse.
In the hospital: As soon as she got in, I reminded them not to give her remdesivir. They said she was passed the window to get that anyway. She was in the step down unit. The nurses said it looked like she had some Covid pneumonia but her lungs weren’t as bad as they could be, and that they would keep her on oxygen. I was sure to ask what drugs she was on to make sure they didn’t use remdesivir. They had her on a rumatoid arthritis drug, baricitinib. I did not know at the time that drug was bad. I had no idea. I later found out that drug is one that was on the NIH approved list and it is bad. I wish I knew sooner.
But, I asked the doctor if they could put her on high dose IV of vitamin C, and the doctor told me that doesn’t work. I told her I disagree and read it helps. She didn’t care, and I said, “Well can you give her vitamins, at least?” and she said, “No, they don’t do anything.”
I asked two times that week if she could take the ivermectin she was prescribed that finally came in. The one nurse sounded very confused and asked me how did you get that? I said she was prescribed it over the phone last week, and was not able to take it yet. The doctors kept saying no. The one doctor said that doesn’t work. I said, “I have read many studies showing it does work,” and she said well it doesn’t work, and they told me she can’t take it.
I was not allowed to visit her since she was in a Covid room. We talked every day, and she didn’t seem that bad. I asked the nurse if I could bring in her NAC. She asked the doctor, and he said, “N,o she can just take it when she goes home.” She was supposed to be discharged tomorrow. But then the next day they said she can’t go home now because her oxygen got worse.
The kept increasing her oxygen, and eventually put her on the humidified oxygen. They started to say she keeps pulling off her mask, and then her oxygen drops. I think the medicine they had her on was making her drowsy and confused so she started to pull it off. They put the helmet on her one night because her oxygen got very low. I later found out that too much oxygen can start to damage your lungs. My mom told me she wanted to come home, and I asked the nurse, and she said they would never discharge her because they don’t have at home oxygen that goes high enough.
My sister thought to ask what her plan was and the nurse said she is on the DNR list. My sister said to my mom “Why did she agree to that?” My mom said she never put that, she only put no ventilator. My sister said, “Well you need to change that, and add the ventilator if needed.” My mom said, “Well I thought the ventilator was bad.” My sister said, “Well it’s just last resort because your oxygen keeps getting worse.” So my mom talked to the nurse and had her change it. My 2 sisters who told her to change it didn’t know any better, and they were just very concerned for her.
I think it was the next night the nurse called me yelling at my mom that she needs to keep her mask on because her oxygen keeps dropping, and if she doesn’t, she will have to go on the ventilator. My mom yelled at her, “I am!” The nurse sounded very annoyed with my mom, like she was starting to become a nuisance or something. I blame the medicine they had her on which probably made her confused.
The next day she called me and sounded fine. Additionally, the doctor left us a message saying her oxygen was getting better, and they will take it one day at a time. So, we were all happy about that. Then all a sudden the next day, the doctor called at 7 a.m., and said my mom’s oxygen dropped to 70 last night, and that they need to intubate her. I was taking all the calls. See my dad was too sick with Covid also. I said, “Okay, well I need to talk to my family. Then they called me at 10 a.m. and said they don’t have any time to wait and that there is no time to let us go in and visit her before. I said well what will happen if we just keep her on the oxygen. He said she will slowly pass away, so they need to do it now. We felt trapped like we had no other options.
They did not give us a choice. We could not even talk to her first. That moment will haunt me for the rest of my life because I didn’t firmly say no, but I didn’t know what else to do at that moment without being given time to thoroughly think it over. It was a very confusing moment of helplines. I truly believe if my mom never changed to the vent list, then she would still be alive today. I think as soon as she changed that they saw the money it would bring in and chose greed over the right thing to do to help someone.
Once she was on the ventilator, I begged the new doctor to give her the ivermectin. He said he can’t so I got loud with him and the team on the phone, and said, “What they are doing is not working because people are dying! So why can’t you try to ivermectin?” He said, “If this was a conversation just between him and me, it would be a different story,” but he had to follow the hospital protocol. He said, “We can look for some other hospital to treat her.” but he said he knew of none who would be willing. So I said, “Well what can we do then, and he said, “Just stay the course and trust in the treatment we do,” or something like that. He made it sound like the treatment would work if we just give it time.
Her x-rays showed Covid pneumonia but not that bad, so we hoped that she would just need this time to heal, then come off.
Then a few nights later they called to say she had a hole in her lung. I freaked out yelling, “How the hell did that happen?” I said, “You must have done that to her with that damn machine!” Then they started giving us mixed information. The one nurse said she didn’t know what happened because it is so rare for that to happen. But another nurse said, “No, it’s not rare because the same just happened to her friend’s dad at another hospital.” This whole time by the way, they kept mentioning this is only happening to unvaccinated people. I was really getting fed up hearing that and wanted to scream at them because I knew the vaccines did not work. So I knew something was going on and I wanted to someday get to the bottom of it.
Later that night, the same nurse from the night before when the hole occurred, called me and said she was so relieved to find out if was just a hole in her lung. She said her oxygen started dropping so low so she was afraid my mom had a huge blood clot, but they didn’t know at the time. So she said when she got in that day she was relieved to find out it was not a blood clot, but instead just a hole in her lung. How is that less severe? Then she started telling me she has no reason to believe that my mom won’t make it out of there. I think she was trying to cover for her mess up from the night before by them turning the machine up too high blowing a hole in her lung!
So a day or so after that, they decided to put a chest tube in her to help aide the hole in her lung. They still would not let us see her yet, but I finally asked one day when can we start visiting and the doctor said, “Oh, I think her Covid window is up so you can visit starting tomorrow.”
By the time I rushed in there the next day her finger tips were black, which they did tell me about a few days ago. But there was also a huge chunk of black dead skin on her back. So I wonder if in that week of her being intubated if they were not flipping her side to side, they were also not doing anything to keep her limbs moving for good blood flow and exercise. By the time I was able to go in, she had been on the ventilator for 1 week. She was kept on sedating drugs that entire time including Propofol. I told the doctor that I read about that drug should only be used short term like a day or two and he responded, “No, it’s ok for her to continue to use it.”
They did lower her drugs at one point, but they said she wasn’t waking up like normal, so they were concerned she had a stroke and did an MRI and did find a few small ones. They said they could have been old. Prior to this, my mom was complaining of being dizzy and vertigo.
Her eyes did finally start to open, but she wouldn’t not look over at me when I talked, she would just look straight and her eye balls looked filled with fluid. The one doctor during week 2, really tried to push her with breathing trials to get her off, and the one nurse sounded optimistic and said to me, “Well she isn’t failing.” So we had hopes that she could be weaned off soon, but as soon as that doctor’s turn was up, and it was the next doctor during week 3, he barely even tried. When I got in and met the new weekly doctor, he said to me, “Oh this must be such a burden on you, would you like to just put her in hospice?” I said, “No it’s not a burden. we want her to make it out of this.” So then he said, “Okay so you want to continue with treatment, okay well the next step is a tracheotomy.” I said, “Why can’t we do more breathing trials first?” And he looked at the same nurse from yesterday, and she said to me, “I don’t think she can do it, Kim.” I said, “What do you mean,, just yesterday you said she wasn’t failing?” Then she gave some excuse. So I said fine to pass on the breathing trials temporarily as long as she can get the trach put in soon.
I think I met him on Wednesday, and he said he would call to set it up that night. The next day they said they are having trouble getting something set up, and it would have to be Friday, if they are lucky, or if not, then Monday. I said, “Well I want it by Friday, I don’t want her waiting until Monday, that is too long to just sit there. Then they told me on Friday that no one can do it until Monday. I was so upset. I said, “Well she just sat there for 2 days when she could have been doing breathing trials to be weaned off of this thing, but you just let her sit there for 2 days and didn’t even try. You are wasting time! I was so upset, but was just waiting for the next 2 days to pass so she could get the trach since they don’t operate on weekends, and then she could finally be comfortable to continue weaning off.
The dr. that week just acted like he didn’t care, and he just left my mom in a waiting, sedated state, until the following week when he was no longer there. It’s like he didn’t want to deal with anything so he just brushed her off. The fact that he suggested a human being go right into hospice without even trying to save her, is disgusting.
On Monday they did the procedure in her room, they said they have been doing them in people’s hospital rooms, which seems unsterile to me, especially since she had C-diff which she picked up in the hospital. I waited in the waiting room, and they came out pretty fast and they said everything went great, so that day they were planning to transfer for to a nursing facility if her insurance would allow it.
At that point, there seemed to be hope. Within the next few days, they removed most of her meds and we were waiting to see if the nursing home would take her. Her eyes would open but still close right away and she would not really respond. But shortly after, when they lowered her drugs I think her heart rate started to go up so they had to keep her partially sedated and on pain meds.
They had her on a lot of things to help with the Cdiff, and they agreed to try probiotics, but would not allow a stool transfer after I offered to be a donor. Her insurance did not allow a transfer to the nursing home and said she had all the care she needed in a hospital so she stayed there, and about a week later they said they wanted to try another chest tube for the hole in her lung. Shortly after that she started to get an infection in her lung and tested positive for pseudomonas and had a new pneumonia. Prior to this, her lungs were not that bad, so these dirty surgeries gave her bacteria and made her lungs worse.
Prior to this infection, we asked if she could be put on anti-biotics just in case and they said, “No, we are waiting to see if her culture comes back positive in 2 days.” Which is did [return positive], so they wasted 2 days letting the infection spread instead of giving her the antibiotics right away as a precaution.
She started to go downhill from there, and they had to paralyze her body a few times to let the machine take over. They had her on so many different IV medications, so she was being pumped up with many chemicals and her body started to retain fluid. I was getting so fed up with them not trying anything that I read which worked in studies. I finally said, “Look, I want to talk to a care team.” So a palliative care nurse listened to me and I showed her information on treatments and I said I want to talk to administration. The next day my sister went in there and the nurse told her my mom was getting worse, and my mom passed away early that next morning at 6:25 a.m. before any of us had the chance to get in there to say goodbye.
The nurses kept telling my sister that it’s only the unvaccinated who are getting so sick that they need to go onto ventilators. When I heard that it made no sense to me as a person who has looked at the global data according to different reports. I saw that vaccinated were dying at a higher rate. So, if the nurse said in this hospital that it’s the opposite, I knew they were likely doing a different protocol for vaccinated and unvaccinated patients. She also told my sister that out of 600 ventilated patients, they were all unvaccinated and only 3 came off alive. I read that the survival rate after being intubated is about 30%, so if what that nurse said is accurate, the survival rate at this hospital is less than 1%, closer to 0%. Those statistics are horrible, and if they told us that information before they intubated her, we would have firmly said no because it is basically a death sentence. I feel like they tricked us into putting her on that just to get the bonus payment because she switched her info to resuscitate and vent if needed just 3 days prior to this.
The hospital messed up in the following ways:
The one doctor did not even try anything and just let her sit there and rot for an entre week until his time was up.
I hope by telling my mom’s story, will help get her justice, and help make a difference so those in charge don’t get away with this any longer.
