The pain of not knowing what happened to her husband after she dropped him off at a Detroit Hospital, torments Denise Chandler. A former nurse helps.
DETROIT — The anguish of not knowing what happened to her husband after she dropped him off at Detroit's Sinai-Grace Hospital on the night of March 28 brings fresh tears to Denise Chandler’s eyesShe couldn’t be by his side at the hospital because he got sick during a pandemic that shut loved ones out of hospitals across Michigan.
She said she hasn't been able to sleep since that horrible day because her mind spins in the lonely late-night hours, thinking about whether Richard might have lived if she had taken him to a different hospital. The nurses allege those problems, and a policy that didn't permit them to perform CPR on patients who had coronavirus or were suspected of having COVID-19, led to the unnecessary deaths of dozens of people.
"I never liked him as a kid," she said."He was just a friend, you know? I never looked at him like that. But my husband told me, 'I've had a crush on you since you were 14.'" Even from the hospital, hours before he died, Richard sent text messages saying he wanted her to get some rest and apologizing for worrying her. He wrote: "I love u too Beautiful and im so sorry for scaring u last night."
"They were devastated when they learned that their father had passed. I wouldn't wish that pain on anybody."Coronavirus swept through the Chandler family in mid-March, Denise said. So they took Kodie to choir rehearsal that night. He sings in the Detroit Youth Choir and was among the children who traveled to Los Angeles last year and competed on"America's Got Talent."
"I guess it came from choir rehearsal," she said."They could have all been exposed. It could have been a parent. It could have been anyone.""We were doing better. We all were doing better," she said. Eichenlaub, who was working as a day-shift nurse in the emergency department at the hospital March 28-29, gave this account:
Levels of some markers in his bloodwork were abnormal. Denise pointed out that the level of troponin, a blood protein that can be measured to gauge whether a person has had a heart attack or may be in cardiac distress, was extremely elevated when his blood was drawn on the night of March 28.And yet, at 9:42 a.m. March 29, Richard texted Denise to tell her that the staff was preparing to discharge him, even though he'd had two episodes when he lost consciousness the night before.
And the second time his heart stopped, Eichenlaub said the doctor in charge refused to allow the the staff to perform CPR. He said viral filters on the ventilator combined with protective equipment for the staff should have been enough to keep them from getting the contagious virus during CPR. All it took to exempt a patient from being eligible for lifesaving CPR was the suspicion of being infected, the nurse said.
After work that day, Eichenlaub recalled:"I went home and talked to my wife about how distraught I was, and she's like, 'I've never seen you like this. This is not you.' And I said, 'Babe, I don't know what to say. I'm lost. I'm lost.' Because ... as comfortable as I've been in this environment, this is where I don't know what to do. ... They were telling us that we shouldn't be doing stuff to help people now because ...
"As for decisions on whether a patient receives CPR, these decisions are made on a case-by-case basis by physicians and the medical care team in accordance with the patient’s advance directive," Taylor said."If a patient requires CPR, of course the patient will receive CPR.""I wish that I could have gotten him somewhere else," she said."I really feel like it would have made the difference in my husband surviving or not surviving.
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