Edith Rodriguez's death, unfortunately, is an in your face testament to our country's lacking medical care system and the lame attitudes toward the ill and suffering. Edith was ignored while seeking HELP at a medical facility, Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital. It is appalling to read that she lay in the floor of a USA emergency room and begged for help, was ignored, while a nurse summoned a janitor to clean up the blood around her! News articles about Edith Rodriguez report that she was a prescription drug and meth addict, which seem to be reported as a means of justifying a medical system who failed her miserably. However, the coroner's report shows that she had no illicit drugs in her system when she made a return visit to the MLK facility on 04/21/07 with continuing stomach pain and vomiting. See: Coroner's Report
The coroner's report shows that Edith had extensive adhesions of the lower abdominal quadrant and that she died of a perforated bowel. The coroner's report reads like a classic American adhesion sufferer's story: presenting at the ER with abdominal pain, nausea, distention, tenderness of the abdomen. Treatment: Pain med's, CT scan, nothing wrong, sent home.
Though MLK is under fire, as they certainly should be, countless adhesions sufferers have lived the same nightmare in emergency rooms all across the US (though most do receive a bed to lie down in rather than being left on the hospital floor). As is chronicled in the book about our daughter and the nightmare she (we) lived, ER visits were all the norm for Melissa, yet she was often ignored or scoffed by medical personnel. More than once we turned around and went back home, believing God to stop the pain, as there was no help for her at the ER.
Until American citizens understand that stories like Edith's are not about a person's class, race, or poor choices in their personal life and come to realize that this is an example of a failing medical system AT LARGE, we will continue to read stories about people such as Edith. Until American citizens demand that the story be told in all its ugliness, without allowing medicine and media to derail the story with reports of prescription and illicit drug use, ALL Americans will continue to suffer.
A human being died due to medical negligence. A human being lay screaming in a hospital floor in the United States of America and she received NO help. That's the story in all its ugliness. And that, dear friends, should make us all quiver in our boots.
