Episode 14: Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies, I’m your host Julie Mattson. Today we’re talking about one of the most monstrous abuses of trust, when a trained healthcare professional takes it upon themselves to kill their patients. Being in healthcare myself, I find it hard to believe anyone would do something like this, because everyone that I’ve been around has all had the same mission as mine, which is to take care of people. For the month of November, we are going to cover medical professionals who have killed, or who are serial murderers.

Ready? Let’s go…

SHOWNOTES:

• A lot of nurses who have done this tend to make excuses and claim that they’re taking someone’s life to end their suffering or on the opposite end of the spectrum, they want to get rid of difficult patients. They might be tired of taking care of someone, and they don’t want to do it anymore, and they figure that the best way to do it is just to over-medicate them or give them a medication that can cause them to go into cardiac arrest. Some also might have hero syndrome, which is where they may give them a medication or too much of a medication to cause them to go into cardiac arrest so that they impress others by trying to revive them being the hero. And a lot of nurses may do this for attention, a lot of nurses may do this because they are depressed, they may want to do this to relieve frustration due to a heavy workload. You also have heard stories of doctors who might kill patients just because of experimental curiosity, wonder what this would do, or they may have a god-like power over patients and it makes them feel special or important. These are reasons in looking into it, why some nurses and doctors have chosen to kill their patients. (05:29)

• This is not to say that every nurse who prefers the night shift is a murderer or should cause concern, but a lot of nurses or people who think that they can get away with murder in a hospital setting might prefer the night shift when no one that works administration is there. It’s quiet, family members are usually not present, may be a little bit easier for them to get away with something. Association with incidents at multiple hospitals can cause issues because those jurisdictions don’t communicate, so if it’s someone who’s had problems at several different hospitals, again and have bounced around from facility to facility, those facilities may not communicate what the problems have been, and so they get completely overlooked and the person may go to work at a hospital with a completely clean slate, even though they’ve caused problems at multiple different institutions. If a nurse or a doctor tries to predict when someone will die, that’s a little suspicious because you really don’t know… Healthy people can have cardiac arrest suddenly and be dead the next day, it can happen very suddenly. You could have a lethal arrhythmia and be gone when you are otherwise healthy or had a great day and were mobile and didn’t have any problems or complaints. (08:22)

• The police also found the recording where he had called his wife from jail and said that he wanted to lengthen the patients stay in the ICU so he could actually get over time. Now, the nurses in that facility said that that wasn’t true, because they were very short-staffed, and he very well could have gotten over time even without injecting these patients with air, causing them to have to stay longer in the ICU after heart surgery. But to me, this is absolutely ridiculous. So, they had found air embolus in all these patients, he had injected it into their IVs to try and say, I did this because I knew that they would become ill or have complications and need to actually stay in the ICU longer, and I could get over time caring for them… No, I don’t think so. So this guy is behind bars as well, will hopefully not see the light of day. (15:43)

• A lot of these people were never in trouble before they committed these crimes, but… I don’t know, something clicked. That’s what we were talking about earlier. I guess, something just clicks. They get this crazy idea that, Hey, if I injure this patient, they’re going to have to stay here longer, and I can get some over time, or if I do something to this patient and that causes them to code, I’m going to look like the good guy. When I start CPR and we can actually bring them back, I’m going to look like a hero. So we’re always loving to all people of all ethnicities and all backgrounds, and part of our job is to be non-judgmental, to remain unbiased and to take care of everybody. So I just find it interesting that there are people that abuse their power in all professions, but I find it particularly interesting in my profession, just because I could never ever, ever imagine doing that. Like I said, staying late and caring for patients and going above and beyond and making sure that they eat dinner before giving them their meds and maybe not even go into the bathroom during a 12-hour shift and not eating lunch, just going home knowing that I cared for my patients to the best of my ability was what helped me sleep at night. And again, it’s not just nurses and doctors, it’s every profession, but I thought that it would be interesting to focus on medical homicides and serial killers that are nurses and doctors because there are many of them. (21:55)

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