Episode 17: Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies, I’m your host Julie Mattson. I don’t mean to scare anybody in talking about nurses and doctors who kill, because there are so many other people that hold our lives in their hands that we really don’t think about because we don’t look at them as caregivers, although they do in some respects actually take care of us. One thing that I have learned as a death investigator is, it’s just the fact that life is short and that you do trust people on a daily basis that you don’t know. You can only hope that they’re good people and they’re not going to do you wrong. Today, let’s continue our series on health care providers that kill, with a few stories of some of those not so good people.
Ready? Let’s get started…
SHOWNOTES:
• I was driving home from work earlier and I started thinking about sometimes how paranoid my job has made me over the years. And as I was driving down the road and it was very dark and the road was very curvy, I got to thinking, you know, I’m trusting that person that’s coming towards me around that curve from the opposite direction not to hit me. And I don’t know them from Adam and I don’t know if they’re paying attention. I don’t know if it’s somebody with a good career or if it’s a kid who just got his driver’s license, but I’m driving on a curvy road in the middle of the night and it’s dark and I’m trusting them without knowing them at all. (00:30)
• Now this happened, I think, between May and September of this year. So it’s very, very new, but he was actually arrested for putting nerve blocking agents and other drugs into IV bags at a surgery center. And so this resulted in the death of one of his coworkers and then also resulted in many of his patients having cardiac emergencies for what’s considered to be a pretty simple surgery. So his name is Ronaldo Rivera Ortiz. He’s a 59 year old. He was recently arrested in Plano, Texas by the police in Dallas, Texas. He faces the maximum of life in prison. But again, another example of somebody whose life is basically in our hands. I think about it frequently when you’re in the hospital and I don’t know how many of you have ever had surgery, but I had a kidney removed back in 2018. And I just remember when the doctor came in and he was talking to me and making small talk, trying to make me comfortable. And he got out his little Sharpie and started making X’s on the left side of my abdomen and my flank. And I thought to myself, wow, I mean, we’ve all heard it happen. How easy would it be for them to be distracted, not be paying attention, be in a bad mood, be upset with someone and mark the wrong area and do surgery on the wrong body part or remove the wrong body part. It’s kind of frightening when you think about it. (04:34)
• They’ve never been written up because that hospital didn’t want any legal consequences. So this looks very much like probably what happened in this case. They wrote him up, but there was never anything major done about it. And he was never fired because he was friends with the CEO. He also reportedly had about $4 million in unpaid taxes. So who knows, maybe he was just trying to take other people down with him because of that. But 10 to 20 patients were transported, incubated, and had to be put on a ventilator because he was tampering with these bags. And so I know I mentioned in an earlier episode, and if you didn’t hear it, I’ll say it again. When I was working in a hospital setting and I would medicate my patients, I always took the blister pack of the medication and all the syringes or whatever I was going to give them into their room unopened. And as I opened them, I would explain what they were, why we were giving them and just try to educate them a little bit and also let them see, I’m opening this, I’m giving you what I’m supposed to, this is not being tampered with, those types of things. (16:43)
• But it does happen. My doctor actually left a sponge inside of me after he delivered my daughter. I’m 21 at the time, had absolutely no knowledge of what it was like to have a baby. And I was trying not to be that complaining patient who whined and something was always wrong, and this hurt and that hurt. I was trying to be tough, right? Because I’m old enough to have a baby, I should be able to handle it. And so he did my episiotomy, left the gauze in there, sewed it up. I go home and this may be TMI, but I go home and I feel this heavy, like pushing feeling on my stitches. And I’m like, what is going on? Again, I’m 21, never had a baby before. And I didn’t want to complain or be that person who calls the doctor over and over and over asking, what’s wrong? Something’s not right. But I did, I had to. I knew something was wrong. It literally felt like another kid was trying to push their way out. And so it was so, so heavy and I couldn’t figure it out. I called him, I swear y’all, I called him three times a week for two solid weeks. (19:33)
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