Mrs. Cher McFerrin’s husband and mother are both victims of the CDC’s deadly hospital protocol, dying just one week apart in 2021. 54 year-old Allen McFerrin had symptoms first, around Aug. 9, 2021, and had to take a covid test for work. On Aug. 11, he saw his primary doctor, who told him not to take the vaccine, because there were better ways to take care of it, and he had had the upper lobe of one lung removed due to cancer just months earlier. He told him he would put him on oxygen and other early medications if he needed them. On the morning of Aug 16, when he got short of breath, he called his nurse to get started on the O2 and meds, but the nurse never called him back.

He waited all day, but by the end of the day, his oxygen saturation level was down to 50, and he had to go to the hospital. Cher was not allowed to stay with him. They put him on a regular mask of oxygen and got his number back up to 91, but wanted to immediately vent him, anyway. They gave him ativan, which suppressed his breathing, and then called his wife to tell her they were going to put him on the ventilator “to give his lungs a rest,” all the while she screamed NO, NO, but they hung up on her and proceeded. She requested a hospital transfer, but was denied. He was given sedatives, paralyzing drugs, fentanyl, morphine, midazolam, 2 blood thinners, and bp meds, and he found out later from his records, that he was restrained. She begged the doctor to put him on the ECCMO machine for his lungs, which he qualified for, but they refused to transfer him to where there was a machine.

For the entire 13 days that he was hospitalized, she was not able to communicate with him. She would call the nurses station asking for updates, and all they would ever say to her was that he was stable, or that he was about the same. One day she called, and was even told by the operator that she couldn’t find his name! The fear and frustration that this woman was feeling at this time, was off the charts; she got the same non-responses of “he’s the same”  from the nurses just a day before his death on Aug. 29, when they called and told her that he wasn’t going to make it. She was stunned, and devastated, and was slapped with the final blow, when they forced her to watch him take his last breath through a glass window.

In the meantime, her mother Debra Sawyer, a 67 year old retired RN, became ill and was admitted to a different hospital in the Birmingham area on August 25. She had a history of a lung disease called Sarcoidosis, and required a steroid inhaler on a daily basis to help her breathe. The hospitalist there was her own rheumatologist, who managed her rheumatoid arthritis, and so she was relieved to see him, although he refused to prescribe her steroid inhaler which she needed desperately. He put her on Veklury, explaining it was for her highly inflammatory RA. He never told her it was remdesivir, and they didn’t know the difference. Cher was also unable to be with her mother in the hospital, to watch after, or care for her. Mrs. Sawyer was denied fluids some time she after she was admitted. She was a retired nurse, and she knew she needed to be up and moving around, in order to breathe deeply, and so she did as often as she could. She sat up in her chair, rather than lying in her bed during the day, but she became weaker and weaker, due to the remdesivir, and the lack of fluids. The nurses began to insist that she lie in her bed all the time, because she was beginning to pass out when she got up.  Her mother called her one day, and told her how terribly thirsty she was, and when Cher asked the nurses why her mama was so thirsty, they had the audacity to tell her that her mother “wasn’t thirsty; she was just oxygen deprived, and confused!”

After that, they set the oxygen flow so high on her nasal canula, that she couldn’t tolerate it, so they put her on a ventilator on 9/1/21. The ventilator blew out her lung, and she had to have chest tubes. Sadly, she died on Sept. 5, just one day after Cher’s husband was buried. Mrs McFerrin has suffered twice with the loss of her husband and her mother, the two most important people in her life. Her family has suffered the losses right along with her, but even in her deep grief, she is determined to keep going.  One burning question that she had, that we all have, is “if a chaplain, a stranger, can dress in PPE, and go in to my husband’s and my mother’s rooms,  then WHY CAN’T I?”