KCK hospital tried to put COVID-19 patient out on the curb with a canister of oxygen
For 19 years, Judith Ellison-Roland worked as a secretary at Providence Medical Center in Kansas City, Kansas. So when she got so sick she couldn’t breathe, while here from California for her granddaughter’s fourth birthday, she asked to be taken where she might see some familiar faces.
For the last month, she has been back on her old floor, and almost died there, of COVID-19. She’s off the ventilator now, and her condition has been upgraded to critical but stable. But she’s still on oxygen, still too weak to walk, still testing positive for the virus. And she is so stressed over where she’s supposed to go from here that “I rub my head and a handful of hair comes out,” she said in a phone interview from her hospital bed. “I’ve never been in a situation like this.”
Can we at least agree that a 68-year-old woman fighting a serious disease — “I was gonna be a statistic,” she said — should not have to worry about anything but getting well? Only, too often, that’s not how our system works, isn’t it? “On a day-to-day basis, I don’t know what’s going to happen to me,” she told me. “They’re trying to put me on the curb with a tube of oxygen and wait for someone to pick me up.”
That’s not a figure of speech, and her family is stressing, too. “Every day for a week,” said her daughter in Kansas City, Kansas, Jamille Roland, “they were calling and saying, ‘She’s being released today; what’s your plan?’ ’’
She’d be waiting for them in the lobby, the social workers kept telling her, along with an oxygen tank available for purchase for the plane ride home.
Ellison-Roland’s son, Jacques Barber, a Los Angeles-based flight attendant who used to volunteer at Providence, should not have had to tell the social worker that they absolutely could not put his mother on a plane while she’s still testing positive for COVID-19.
Or that her gastrointestinal bleed means she can’t even be driven home to California.
Or that while she’s still contagious, her children and their families can’t take her in, either.
“It’s been a mess,” Barber said. “And the hospital administrators have been horrible. Horrible.”
At first, according to Barber, they said she was being discharged because her insurance wouldn’t pay for her treatment out of state and wouldn’t approve her transfer to a rehabilitation hospital, either.
Neither of those things turned out to be true; she is well insured, by both Medicare and through the Department of Veterans Affairs, since her late husband was a 15-year Army veteran who by the way received a Purple Heart for his service in Vietnam. Requiring care while out of state isn’t an issue, her insurers have assured Barber.
Finally, after a week of hearing that his mother was going to be put out any minute, “I kind of lost it a little bit,” her son said. The social worker “said, ‘If you’re going to yell, I’m going to hang up,’ and I said, ‘Sweetheart, if I was yelling at you, you’d know it. What I’m doing is speaking sternly.”
Now that he has gotten the paperwork proving that his mother has been approved for care in a rehab facility, Providence is saying there’s no longer any room in all of the places they’d normally send Ellison-Roland.
“Due to them not running the insurance,” her daughter said, “now there’s nowhere for her to go. She doesn’t understand why they keep telling her, ‘You’re leaving,’ and we can’t even speak to anyone there face to face because of COVID.” Roland drops off food for her mom every day, in hopes of getting her to eat a little something. Other than that, “I just tell her to pray. At this point, that’s all we can do.”
Kansas State rep. Cindy Holscher, who is trying to help this family find a solution, wonders if maybe hospital administrators saw an older Black lady who’d been there for a while and made assumptions they shouldn’t have about whether she could pay. “And now that they know she has great insurance, maybe they want her in the system. I know hospitals are stretched and paperwork is horrible, but it shouldn’t be this complicated.” Or this chaotic and cold.
Unfortunately, I don’t know the hospital’s side of the story. Patient privacy is always an issue, and the hospital spokesman never returned the message that it took some doing to even get to him. (Hey Sam Allred, how long has your voice mailbox been full?)
But I do know that no American, with or without insurance, should have to fear being discharged with no plan beyond a $20 canister of oxygen. I do know that in your shoes, administrators, I would worry about the ghosts of those nuns who founded Providence Hospital knocking on my bedpost some night.
And I do know that six months into this pandemic, after nearly 200,000 Americans have died of COVID-19, we still haven’t figured out how to handle this disease, especially in those who need long-term care.
This story was originally published September 18, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
