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Monday, October 7, 2024 - 05:51 AM

INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE VOICE OF UPSTATE SOUTH CAROLINA

First Published in 1994

INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE VOICE OF
UPSTATE SOUTH CAROLINA

Vitamin SEE Book Gayla PrewittBOLIVAR, Mo. -- "My heart is breaking for somebody who didn't get to be a part of the medical decision-making for her husband. This should not be happening in America!" said  registered nurse Priscilla Romans in an emotional video appeal for prayer. Romans, founder of the patient advocacy agency Graith Care, left mainstream hospital practice after becoming disillusioned with the system and witnessing the loss of patient rights. The wife, Romans mentions, is just one of many clients across the U.S. represented by the advocacy service.

"They removed the ventilator without (the wife's) consent," added Romans. "They're giving IV fentanyl medication that she asked not to give. The nurse proceeded to give it because the doctor told her to. I am heartbroken right now because I don't know if he is going to survive this. Because they are clearly giving IV medication to hasten his death," said Romans.

Romans' agonizing testimony confirms the suspicions of Christian author Gayla Prewitt, who also believes doctor-prescribed IV fentanyl was given to her husband Peter to hasten his death while in a hospital intensive care unit. "After Peter's death, I would uncover information that I believe reveals at some hospitals, protocols have crossed the line all under the guise of compassion and using the term, "palliative care," said Prewitt.

In a 2015 article by the Association of American Medical Colleges, Having the Talk: When Treatment Becomes End-of-Life Care, a Stanford Medical School professor mentions how difficult talks about end- of-life-care can be when patients and families have specific religious beliefs. "Some cultures believe that a person should die only by the will of God, and humans shouldn't interfere," said VJ Periyakoil, MD, associate professor of geriatrics, hospice, and palliative medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. "Others 'pray for a miracle' for a patient in the ICU when the doctor knows that the treatment is prolonging not the patient's life, but the dying process."

In a 2018 article, Palliative Sedation, an End-of-Life Practice That Is Legal Everywhere, author Michael Ollove states, "Whether palliative sedation hastens death remains an open question. Pain-management doctors say sedation slows breathing and lowers blood pressure and heart rates to potentially dangerous levels."   An excerpt from the 2009 New York Times article, Hard Choice for a Comfortable Death: Sedation, adds, "The possibility that the process might speed death has some experts contending that the practice is, in the words of one much-debated paper, a form of 'slow euthanasia,' and that doctors who say otherwise are fooling themselves and their patients."

While the morality of the situations mentioned in the previous articles is debatable, Prewitt adds there is a significant distinction between those situations and the one she and the wife mentioned by Romans faced. In both cases, the decision to give potentially lethal doses of drugs was not made by either patient or their families but forced upon the patients by the doctors and, ultimately, the corporate America medical machine.

In Appleton, Wisconsin, the family of Grace Schara, a 19-year-old woman with Down Syndrome, who died, is suing the hospital there, claiming "hospital medical professionals administered a cocktail of lethal drugs and illegally wrote a 'Do Not Resuscitate' (DNR) order," for Grace. Prewitt adds that hospital records for her husband also list a DNR order that she never agreed to.

"You need to understand what is happening in these hospitals has just gone from bad to worse," said Romans. "I believe that we are at a time that I never imagined. All the time I have done advocacy work and my 20-plus advocates at Graith Care, we have seen things we have never seen before."

"A week after he entered the hospital, they listed my husband as terminal, all unknown to me at the time," said Prewitt. "After that, his hospital records show there was a steady uptick in the amount of IV fentanyl that he was given," Prewitt believes her husband received potentially lethal amounts as defined by the National Capital Poison Center.

According to a 2019 article, Fentanyl Can Lead To Overdoses In Hospitals, Too, Mount Caramel Hospital fired a doctor "after ordering 'significantly excessive and potentially fatal' doses of pharmaceutical fentanyl. The overdoses began in 2014 and involved dozens of patients." The article also states, "the doses in these cases range from 200 to 2,000 micrograms." Toward the end of his life, Prewitt's husband received the 200-microgram dose hourly, and accumulatively his dosage would have far exceeded 2000 micrograms in just 24 hours.

Prewitt's husband entered the ICU because of an infection resulting from a weakened immune system after cancer treatment. A few weeks before entering the ICU, test results showed her husband's cancer was in remission. "His oncologist had a newly approved drug to raise his blood counts. We had hope for the future," said Prewitt.  For days the doctors gave her husband the wrong antibiotics, which resulted in his condition deteriorating into septic shock. In addition, doctors refused Prewitt's request for complementary treatments that had helped her husband before. "Even though I had medical power of attorney, they refused the treatments I requested," said Prewitt. "I invoked the right to try law. The doctors said that gave me the right to ask. They still refused the additional treatments."

"You better make sure that the doctor that is taking care of you is giving you all of your options," said Romans. "That includes complementary type measures. That includes allopathic that includes holistic and alternative. How dare these hospitals deny people."

The doctors finally gave her husband the correct antibiotics. "While I celebrated that the infection was gone, thinking that his body just needed time to heal, a team of healthcare workers entered the room and pressured me to give my husband "compassionate" end-of-life care," said Prewitt. "They wanted to add 'aggressive' doses of Ativan and morphine on top of all the other medications. He had been unconscious for days. I said 'no,' it wasn't up to them or me, but to God."

Prewitt writes about her husband's tragic hospital journey in her recently released book, Vitamin SEE, Why I believe Hospital Doctors' Refusal to Look Beyond the Corrupt Pharmaceutical-Only Model Killed My Husband. Prewitt hopes that giving this account will empower others and save lives in the future.

"Don't check into a hospital until you have read this book," said Dr. John Vaughan, founder-owner of Church Growth Today. "An absolutely essential hospital patient information guide."

In the book, Prewitt also calls for repealing laws currently enacted in 35 states and Washington, D.C., which often prevent the establishment of new hospitals that would provide competition against the current corporate medical machine. In 2008, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission called these laws a violation of "antitrust measures" and claimed repealing the laws would give consumers/patients more choices and better service.

Such prospective changes in the system can't come soon enough for Romans. "When they say this is the standard of care, the standard of care is failing people. It is going to fail you and your family, and it is going to shock you one way or another."