My husband was initially diagnosed with mild COVID pneumonia on Monday Jan. 17th, 2022 and was dead a week later Monday Jan. 24th, 2022.  He was admitted into the hospital on Thursday Jan. 20th, 2022. He was only in the hospital from Thursday the 20th until Monday the 24th.  When he was admitted initially, we told the staff that he did not want to be put on a ventilator.

The staff acted rude towards us for not wanting to vent.  After him and I discussed it further, we decided to let them ventilate him if the pulmonologist felt it was necessary.  On Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday the pulmonologist said he didn’t need the vent yet.  Monday morning he was dead.  On Saturday, the attending physician said they would try to move him to the ICU in case he needed to be ventilated but they didn’t have any beds open in the ICU.

Why didn’t they transport him to a hospital that had a bed open so that he could be monitored more closely?  He was on a telemetry floor.  He was hooked up to the monitors initially but while I was there Sunday afternoon, a nurse came in and unplugged him from the monitors and said the Dr didn’t feel it necessary to leave him plugged up.  Why did the Dr feel this way if they were talking about moving him to ICU when a bed came open to be monitored more closely?  My theory is that the nurses got tired of hooking him back up to the monitors whenever he would accidentally become unhooked whenever he rolled over.

The respiratory therapist told him to roll over as much as possible so he was becoming unhooked a lot and the nurses just got tired of having to go into his room and hook him back up.  Had he been hooked up to the monitors, they would have known immediately when he got out of bed Monday morning and fell.  When I got to the hospital after having received the call that he was gone, the nurses met me outside the room and said they heard him fall and got in there immediately.  However, after looking through the medical records it shows that he wasn’t found until the Dr made rounds.

From the records, he could have been in the floor for around 45 minutes before anyone noticed.  Had he been hooked up to the monitors, he would probably still be here today.  Also, on Sunday the attending physician Dr. Jimmie (James) Fulmer suggested them remove him from 100% bipap oxygen and use a nasal cannula to allow him to eat.

However, the respiratory therapist told Dr. Fulmer if he did that, he’d probably end up emergency venting him because you can’t just remove someone from 100% bipap oxygen to a nasal cannula without weaning them down on the bipap.  The respiratory therapist suggested they try to wean him down on Monday.  During the early hours of Monday morning, he apparently started fighting the bipap and so the nurses gave him 4 doses of Ativan within a 4 or 5 hour period to try to call him down.

If he was fighting the bipap, why didn’t they go ahead and emergency vent or at the very least send him to ICU so that he would be monitored more closely.  My husband was completely 100% coherent on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and could hold normal conversations with me when I visited with him during visiting hours.  Also, he had told the nurses on both Saturday and Sunday that he needed to use the bathroom and wasn’t able to use the bedpan.

The nurses didn’t offer to help him at all and said the bedpan was the only option. This isn’t true though. When my sister was pregnant and had issues with constipation, she went to the ER and they cleaned her out while she lay in the bed.  Why couldn’t they do the same for him? Or why couldn’t they place a portable toilet next to his bed and help him on and off of it so that he could stay hooked up to the bipap while he used the bathroom? They literally gave him no other option aside from a bed pan. Had they of and had they left him hooked up to the monitors, it literally could have saved his life.

My husband was 42 and completely healthy aside from high blood pressure (which was controlled with rx) and being overweight.  He very rarely ever even got sick.  The summer before he was walking 3 miles a day/5 days a week during the afternoon when the heat index was well over 100.

We were married almost 20 years and had no kids.  He was my life.  We worked together and were around each other 24/7.  I’m absolutely lost.  They also seemed to have an attitude about him not being vaccinated.

Literally one of the first questions they asked was his vaccination status.  Like what does that matter?  Do the unvaccinated get treated differently?  Did he get treated differently because he was overweight?  The lawyers I sent his case to said we have a clear cut case of wrongful death but that they couldn’t do anything because of the CARES/PREP Act.  My husband deserves justice.  He was murdered.  The statute in Arkansas is 2 years.  I’ve got 10 months left.  Please help.