Lawyer: Nurse Assistant Denied Care After Patient Attack Leaves Her in Vegetative State

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

In this article I found on FoxNews is a mystery of sorts that any mystery writer would love to take on and solve. However it will be up to a lawyer, an insurance company, and a workers compensation board to decide how the mystery will be defined, instead of solved. This article describes the sad story of a husband caring for a wife that has been rendered an invalid after a devastating stroke. But unlike other stories, this husband claims he needs compensation whether the stroke was a work related injury or not, and he is trying to get help from a lawyer to prove his case so he can be compensated for the loss of his wife’s income. The husband claims his wife’s last words stated “she was afraid she would be fired for reporting that she had been assaulted at her hospital nursing job.” The coverage he needs to care for her is being disputed between her insurance and workers compensation as both are refusing to pay.


I’m interested in anything of a medical nature and also in the people who provide medical care. This certified nurse assistant was apparently assaulted while providing care to a patient at a hospital where she was employed, but the hospital says that her current condition is not the result of the injury and so they are not liable. But then conveniently the insurance company Blue Cross denies coverage because they say it is a workers compensation case. Mostly I am just in favor of this woman getting fair treatment.


I’m hoping the one who has to pay the most, is the one who is responsible for this woman. She has paid her dues both in insurance premiums and in job performance for the hospital. She did not ask to be attacked nor did she ask to have a stroke. Somebody now owes her whether it is the insurance company or workers compensation. There seems to be no compassion on the faultless woman who is now in a vegetative state. There do seem to be clear facts listed in the article to work with, on trying to decide who is responsible to pay for this woman’s care, but it does have other sides to the story. You have the hospital side, the insurance side, the lawyer’s side, the husband’s side and the medical records side. However it still has an ere of mystery surrounding the facts, like why was she attacked on April 14 and 16, told to make an appointment on April 20, but then turned away from that appointment for some reason, yet medical records from April 20th note in Mendoza's medical records says she was "in her usual state of health until about a week ago when she was bitten at work and had increased anxiety about her work injury." “The records also note that Mendoza had developed high blood pressure since the incidents.” Then there is the mystery of why she was afraid to report to her boss what had happened, but apparently she did report it because otherwise why would she have been asked to make a clinic appointment? Her husband stated at dinner on April 20 "she was terrified, and very tired, and had a headache, and wondering if her boss was going to fire her," said Ralph Mendoza. "Her last words were that her boss was going to get mad at her for reporting what had happened."


Agreeably there is nothing that can be done to help this woman, nor is anyone at fault for what happened to this woman in the attack or the stroke, but there is a responsibility on the part of someone to help this woman’s husband care for her. Instead of the usual murder mysteries of ‘who did it’, this one could be ‘who is going to do it’!