Neil Armstrong’s Death, and a Stormy, Secret $6M Settlement
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
“This event at Kennedy Space Center will receive national news coverage,” Wendy Armstrong wrote. “Rick and Mark have been solicited by several book writers and filmmakers for ‘information about Neil that no one already knows.’” The lawyer suggested that unless the parties reached a quick settlement, the hospital would be publicly criticized for giving lethally flawed care to one of America’s most famous and revered public figures.
Well that's nice, a touch of blackmail is always nice.
Regardless of the care being flawed, he was 82 years old! It's hard not to paint the family as opportunistic and greedy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/health/neil-armstrong-hea...
If someone was 82, and a quality-of-life surgery is elected to be performed, it is always the patient and the doctors making that decision. Surgeries can go wrong, they carry risk, heart surgery more so, heart surgery with an 82 year old even more so. Should we be holding the health care system accountable? Even when the risks are known? Do we all of a sudden have the expectation that every open heart surgery will be successful and no one will die? Hospitals shouldn't be rewarded for failures, but placing full blame on an organization with an impossible mandate seems a little bit unfair.
"Do patients always die if wire removal causes bleeding? No — it is very rare, surgeons said. Patients should be rushed to the operating room ... But Mr. Armstrong was taken to a cardiac catheterization lab first, before he went to surgery. The cath lab, Dr. Haft said, 'is not the solution.' ... By the time Mr. Armstrong got to the operating room, his heart had stopped and he had brain damage from a lack of blood to his brain. He died without regaining consciousness."
"The expert reviews focus on the hospital’s decision to bring Mr. Armstrong to a catheterization lab rather than directly to an operating room when he began to experience complications. 'The decision to go to the cath lab was THE major error,' Dr. Joseph Bavaria, a vice-chair of cardiothoracic surgery at University of Pennsylvania wrote in a review conducted at the request of the Armstrong family."
Veteran care has improved drastically since the first Bush administration (might have been started with Clinton, I dunno for sure). Cheney used VA hospitals for full body scans, etc which my father casually used as a reason to get his own. All veterans are equal in the VA now.
Largely, hospitals ALL have a basic level of competence in the US (meaning medical training and certification and subject to regulation) and it's disrespectful to imply otherwise. There is no benefit to people dying in a hospital. Nobody wins and the penalties are stiff. The staff are people, which are imperfect (often overworked) and situations are fluid.
The idea that opening him up again was going to save him, is tenuous. It would not surprise me to find the implant wires caused angina; given his history it would be warranted that a nurse would move the patient to cath, since the heart can only survive so many "insults". A nurse is not a doctor and doctors (especially cardiologists) are RARELY walking around, especially in that facility at that time. The nurse made a call and a patient died that may have died anyway waiting for a doctor to make the decision.
No way. Look at the Centers for Medicare Services ratings and check out the shitshow that lower rated hospitals are. When you see high cdiff infections, that’s a sign of general incompetence — poor hygiene, undertrained or untrained staff, or insufficient staffing levels.
Disrespect is allowing patients to suffer needlessly. The people running those facilities deserve none.
My pacing wires were removed by the ICU resident (a physician), not a nurse. It's not a complicated thing, they just grab and pull. Maybe his wires were implanted incorrectly so they damaged something when getting removed?
They also made it really clear that if you start bleeding during a cath procedure then they crack your chest open immediately. Not sure what they thought could happen in the cath lab if he was already bleeding internally.
it's such a shame, they fucked up badly but i couldn't even imagine being part of the OR team that lost Neil Armstrong.
Alternative here:
https://time.com/5633280/neil-armstrong-estate-6-million-set...