Photo by http://www.stltoday.com
Is this what our country has been reduced to? In a shocking display of disregard for human life, a Richmond Heights woman died as a result of being denied medical treatment at Saint Mary’s Health Center.
Anna Brown went to the emergency room at St. Mary’s on September 21, 2001, complaining of pain so severe in her legs that she could not stand. Ms. Brown had already sought help at 2 other area hospitals and was turned away. This time, desperate for relief from her agony, she refused to leave.
Instead of taking her seriously, the St. Mary’s staff had Ms. Brown arrested for trespassing. The officer rolled her out of the hospital, cuffed in a wheelchair, after a doctor working that evening stated she was healthy enough to be locked up.
Ms. Brown’s life comes to a tragic end a little after this point in the story. She was 29 years old, a homeless mother of 2. She was on Medicaid, and as an autopsy revealed, dying from the blood clots that originated in her legs and spread to her lungs.
Ms. Brown informed police that she could not walk into the police station, so she was indignantly dragged by her arms into the station. They left her lying on the floor of a cell, and she passed away fifteen minutes later.
Police suspected her of using drugs. (A classic case of a street person being profiled..) Of course, the autopsy showed no drugs in her system.
Almost a postmortem slap in the face, the police had Ms. Brown rushed back to St. Mary’s after she was found dead on the floor of her cell.
My fellow Americans… how can this story not make your stomach turn? Is this a problem in the system? No. This is a result of the ignorant, hateful, selfish, biased, privalaged world view of some of the nurses and doctors in our hospitals. I can just see the snobby nurses turning their nose up at this helpless woman, due to her situation in life. As though, quality medical care is not something she deserved. I can see them treating her with indignity, like less of a creature and therefore not worthy of pity. I can see her crying out for help and being ignored, much as so many others that are left to die on the streets daily.
How can this not move you? How can we ever change? Why are human beings capable of such great good, but so reserved to stay in their comfort zones while their fellow man suffers?
This will always be a mystery to me.
In Memory of all the Street People,
Skeeter
savedbyscience 
Do you suppose those blood clots were caused by smoking and/or birth control?
I don’t think I could even being to speculate on that. Though I know that those are side-effects of both. Clots in the legs can be caused by trauma and injuries as well as things like turbulence!