Hospital Refuses Care to Man With Parkinson’s Who Broke His Hip, Until Someone Stepped In

By Katie Short
Life News

Life Legal regularly receives calls from family members of patients who are mistreated or denied care in hospitals around the country. These are often extraordinarily difficult cases that require immediate, life-saving action.

Over the weekend, one of my family members required Life Legal’s intervention.

On Saturday evening, I visited my sister’s father-in-law Leon in the hospital. He suffers from Parkinson’s disease and had broken his hip in a recent fall. I saw him in the hospital two days after his hip replacement surgery.

When I entered his room, I was appalled. This was not the same man I had seen at a family gathering just two weeks prior. His skin was yellow, he was gasping for air, and he was obviously in distress. I asked the family what was going on and they said the nurses told them his behavior was “normal.”

But I knew something was terribly wrong.

I went to the nurses station and got the brush off. “We’re watching him,” they said. But in the thirty minutes I had been there, no one looked in on him despite the family’s repeated pleas for help.

When I checked on Leon again, he looked even worse. His breathing was shallow and his eyes were rolling back in his head.

I decided it was time to pull out the attorney card. I asked for help again, saying the patient was my sister’s father-in-law and that I am an attorney with experience in cases like this.

Within minutes, a barrage of nurses and techs rushed into Leon’s room. He was immediately hooked up to an oxygen mask, received a chest X-ray, and was on his way to another floor where he would be carefully monitored.

Shorty afterward, his cardiologist and neurologist arrived for a thorough evaluation. This, despite the fact that the family had been begging the nurses to call his doctors for two days.

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