Because she had been fired as a patient, she could no longer go to either of the two hospitals in the Eugene area whenever she got a cold or flu. The pulmonologists from Oregon Lung Specialists serviced both hospitals and were refusing to treat her if she showed up to either one of them.

 

Before contracting the respiratory infection, Catherine was in good health. She had no progressive conditions or degenerative diseases. However, she had longstanding depression and anxiety going back to before her spinal cord injury, and both of these conditions had escalated in severity in the months leading up to her hospitalization because the pulmonary doctors in the Eugene area had fired her. The lack of having doctors nearby to treat her if she ever got a cold or flu put her into a constant state of fear and terror. Her depression and anxiety also escalated because nurses at PeaceHealth Riverbend hospital in Springfield had abused her during a recent hospital stay. The nurses punished her for her refusal to comply with the doctors’ orders for permanent tracheostomy by severely restricting her access to her personal care employees and family. For a person who was severely disabled from quadriplegia and who experienced severe panic attacks whenever she was alone in a hospital without someone familiar close at hand, it amounted to brutal torture. The nurses' abusive treatment triggered in her a full-blown case of generalized anxiety disorder with extreme panic attacks and exacerbated her longstanding depression to the point where it also became extremely severe, making her suicidal.

 

Consequently, at the time of her hospitalization in Corvallis, she was actively suing Oregon Lung Specialists for their mistreatment and abandonment of her, as well as PeaceHealth for the traumatic abuse she suffered at the hands of the nurses. Lawsuits aside, her struggles with her medical providers in Eugene prejudiced her in her medical record by pegging her as a difficult, non-compliant patient.

 

In the months prior to her hospitalization, Catherine’s newly exacerbated clinical depression was essentially left untreated, because her psychiatrist chose to focus on treating her anxiety, which seemed more urgent because it came with severe, sporadic physical pains and panic attacks. For the first time in her life she was prescribed a benzodiazepine drug (Xanax). She had been taking the antidepressant drug Celexa to treat depression for years, but it had long since lost its effectiveness and was not really up to the task of treating depression as severe as what she was experiencing.

 

Once in the hospital in Corvallis, Catherine was repeatedly approached by the hospital's Patient Care Services team, who said they could help her to cross over in peace and comfort. After three weeks in the hospital getting respiratory therapy treatments, she had nearly completely resolved the respiratory infection. But she was still severely depressed. Despite being deemed by the respiratory therapist on duty at the time as being "not a candidate for intubation," she was intubated and four days later, after being threatened by the doctors to accept going home with a tracheostomy or accept dying from medical non-treatment or neglect, she finally caved in to the Patient Care Services team’s soothing sales pitch for peace and comfort and to her own thoughts of suicide by making the “decision” to have herself killed. The next day, she was put on a morphine drip, which made her largely clueless as to what was going on, and at six o'clock in the afternoon, the doctor euthanized her by infusing her with morphine and removing her intubation tube.

 

It was euthanasia because of the use of morphine, which is never used when removing an intubation tube because it depresses the respiratory drive (a contraindication if the goal is to have the patient live following extubation), and the fact that the doctor did not put her on bipap non-invasive ventilation after removing the intubation tube (she had become ventilator dependent from being mechanically ventilated for four weeks). Without continued ventilation after the removal of her intubation tube, she was certain to suffocate within minutes. Her physical condition at the time of the extubation was such that she could have been put on bipap non-invasive ventilation and then slowly weaned off the ventilator. But that was an outcome the doctors did not want to see. They wanted her to be either trached or dead when she left the hospital.

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She was not terminally or gravely ill at the time of her death. She had no infections in her body. Her vital organs were functioning well and were in good condition, and her blood work was normal. Her left lung was perfect and her right lung had only a small amount of residual secretions in it following her resolved respiratory infection. She did have some fluid outside of her right lung due to IV fluid overloading, and she was refusing to have a drainage catheter placed to drain it out (she was suicidal and wanted to die). I had alerted the Patient Care Services team twice that my partner was clinically depressed and experiencing suicidal ideation, but they dismissed me and stated that they did not consider depression a valid reason to deny a patient their wishes.

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Unfortunately, in the months leading up to her hospitalization in Corvallis, as she was experiencing severe depression and anxiety with panic attacks, she began taking the maximum amount of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax that her psychiatrist permitted, including at bedtime with her sleep medication, trazodone.  Together with the other nervous system affecting drugs she was taking, including Celexa and buspirone, it caused a side effect: aspiration during sleeping, resulting in a need to cough a lot throughout the morning hours and sometimes into the afternoon.  The coughing made it seem as though she was in poor health, leading many of her friends and acquaintances to think that her health was in decline.  In the hospital in Corvallis, as she succumbed to the Patient Care Services team’s overtures for death, this view of her found its way to her doctors and nurses and became a justification for them to support her “decision” to be killed.

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Adding to the whirlwind of pressures leading Catherine to her death was the presence of people in her orbit who were supporters of euthanasia and who went along with the death program. This included one of Catherine's domestic employees. The employee had worked for Catherine for many years and was beginning to show signs of job burn out. Catherine made an effort to see that the employee would continue working by asking the employee to work fewer hours. Due to her rising clinical depression, hiring and training a new worker was too much for her to face.

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In the hospital, the employee supported Catherine's "decision" to have herself killed, yet was largely in the dark about her mental health history and ongoing battles with her medical providers. Catherine never shared her personal health or other personal information with anyone. The employee became well liked by the hospital's pro-euthanasia staff and ended up playing a supportive role in the death program.

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I was harassed and threatened by nurses when I tried to talk Catherine out of having herself killed. As soon as she made her “decision” to be killed, the doctors and nurses went on a death care plan in which anyone who did not go along with the death program was harassed and threatened. The doctors and nurses did not want their patient to be talked out of death, as that would have disrupted the death program. It was made clear to me that if I attempted to talk her out of having herself killed, I would be removed from the hospital, by force if necessary. So I wasn’t present when she was euthanized. I opposed her murder, and if present, I certainly would have done something to stop it, but I was severely traumatized and in shock from the sneering, scowling nurses and the mystifying, insane reality with which I was presented. I wasn't able to face the prospect of even more trauma from what I perceived as a high probability of having to be removed from the hospital by security guards if I were to be present and object to the death proceedings.

 

Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center's Patient Care Services team and critical care doctors were the closest thing to pure evil I have ever encountered. Catherine was a clinically depressed person who was preyed upon by cold-hearted, messed-up-inside medical professionals who wanted her out of their hair for good because she wasn't an obedient patient and because she was seen as a big financial liability to the healthcare system. Medical professionals should not bully patients into accepting treatments that are unwanted and unneeded while at the same time lulling them to their deaths with soothing sales pitches. Instead, they should strive to cure disease processes such as depression and treat the symptoms of these disorders, not collude with symptoms such as suicidal ideation and end up taking innocent lives in the process.

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