FWIW I knew this doc professionally. He was better (and less arrogant) than many other transplant surgeons. I cannot imagine what happened but will reserve judgment until more info comes out.
I also know the hospital well, and it was always a more ethical place than most hospitals, and more ethical than many of its competitors in the Houston Medical Center. (The largest medical center in the world, I feel compelled to add, in true Texas style.) It had a lot of Medicaid patients, while some of the more famous hospitals there will not take Medicaid patients at all...(they would close their emergency room permanently if it leads to a smaller profit margin for a billion dollar 'nonprofit'...) Factor in that Texas refuses Medicaid expansion, and its reimbursement is atrocious, and you see how any hospital in Texas that takes it deserves credit. Bottom line: closing the whole program is a tragedy.
This is going to present a golden opportunity for Keith Morrison to ask his probing (ubiquitous) question to a victim of a crime: "What did it feeeel like?"
I used to work on a transplant ward and doctors have ALL the power over who get transplants. Mainly for tairly sensible reasons- there's no sense giving perfectly good organs to people with, say, unmanaged diabetes (high blood sugar is a major cause of transplants, now you know) or drug addictions they don't want to kick. But yeah, all of that has to be charted ACCURATELY- when a surgeon inevitably winds up in court for malpractice, she needs to be be able to point to the evidence of why this patient was not a good transplant risk in her charting & how it lines up with nurses' charts (which are separate) and other hospital records.
One of my patients who was refused a transplant was in his early 20s; he'd already lost one donor kidney due to not taking care of it and when I met him he had serious abdominal issues and was refusing everything except narcotics- even having his vitals done, until we told him we couldn't give him pain meds without vitals. I asked him why he wasn't making an effort, basically, and he told me he was sick of being sick. I empathise so deeply- I mean, imagine having a kidney transplant in your teens & having what seem like endless restrictions when you just want to be like your friends. But I also understand why they denied him.
Anyone who plays with people's lives like this deserves to be done for murder. I won't say the death penalty, although God knows it would be a much fairer use, if they could get it right, than throwing it at every poor dumb asshole who pulls the trigger in an armed robbery and immediately regrets it. But doing this to people just because you can is murder.
It’s always follow the money. Get a CFE to do an analysis of that doctors income from dialysis vs. transplants I had to do exactly that one time and it was very clear, there’s more income in dialysis.
I have also been thinking about the fact that when something like this happens, almost inevitably we find that more than one person had suspicions or knew, but didn’t do anything because they didn’t want to risk their own ass. Very rare that somebody is such an absolute genius that their behavior goes totally undetected before they finally get caught.
I wonder how Houston organizes its organ donation program?
I had a kidney transplant.
When things got bad enough, I got to list at one hospital and once I started dialysis, I listed at another hospital.
Living in South Jersey, I listed at a Philly hospital and an NJ hospital. They use different donor networks. Philly gets organs from Gift of Life. NJ gets organs from Sharing Network. These are third party nonprofits, which are independent of individual hospitals.
When listing, I met with a doctor from the hospital who worked in the transplant department. Not the surgeon, just a doctor to supervise things. I didn’t meet this doctor again. I had to go through some physicals to show I’m healthy enough to receive an organ transplant before getting on the transplant list. It’s a major surgery that puts stress on the body, and I needed to be healthy enough to tolerate the surgery.
The transplant department wanted monthly bloodwork until a donor was found, living or deceased. The doctor I first met reviewed these labs to make whatever markers they looked for that affected compatibility with possible donors hadn’t changed. I had an annual in person follow-up to check on my health with a PA (pre-COVID). The only doctor I saw was my nephrologist, who handled my dialysis treatment. In NJ, dialysis treatment requires the patient to have a doctor for the treatment. The doctor adjusts the parameters of the dialysis treatment based on lab tests that were drawn every two weeks. Usually met my doctor at the dialysis center once a month to go over things.
No where in this process was a transplant surgeon involved, until the day I got a call that a matching deceased donor kidney was available. After I agreed to use the kidney, the transplant surgeon became involved in further evaluating the kidney before transplant and performing the surgery.
The hospital and surgeon and any individual in the transplant department did not have any direct input in deciding whether or not I remained on the transplant list after I listed, unless there was an actual medical condition that would’ve prevented me from remaining on the list.
Ta, Robyn. This is horrid. As many of you know, all my clients are HIV positive. One of the things I do is educate them on how to care for themselves. I spend quite a bit of time educating them on liver health, because they need the healthiest liver possible to detoxify the drugs they must take daily. Many of them use cocaine/crack and/or drink alcohol. No matter how often they hear me say the two worst drugs for the liver are cocaine and alcohol, they haven't found the will to give them up. Still, I never give up on them; I wish all of them the greatest health they can achieve and the deepest peace they can feel. With their health concerns, I doubt any of them would qualify medically for a transplant, even if we could get Medicaid to pay for one.
You might be interested in the story of nurse Richard Allen Williams who was charged with killing 10 patients at Truman VA hospital in Columbia, Missouri in 1992. It is believed that he killed dozens more there, and dozens more at the nursing home in Sedalia where he worked before taking the VA Hospital job. He always worked the night shift, and allegedly he injected patients with the muscle relaxant succinylcholine to stop their breathing. He allegedly had some kind of God Complex and believed he was sparing the patients' families from pain and suffering. That's just a guess, because he never admitted it.
Dr. Gordon Christensen, who was acting chief of staff and second in command of the Truman VA hospital at the time, found patients were 10 times more likely to die while Williams was on duty. He reported his suspicions to the hospital director, J.L. Kurzejeski, but Mr. Kurzejeski repeatedly refused to call the FBI.
And so when nothing happened for several months, Dr. Christensen reported his suspicions to the FBI himself, who opened an investigation. The VA retaliated against Dr. Christensen as a whistleblower, and he found a new position with the University of Missouri Hospital (right across the street from the VA Hospital). Dr. Christensen died in 2020 at the age of 71.
The only action the VA director took was to transfer Mr. Williams to a non-patient-care position, from which Mr. Williams soon resigned. He was then hired at a nursing home in nearby small town of Ashland, where he allegedly killed dozens more people.
The FBI spent five years looking into 43 deaths on the hospital floor where Williams worked and found 33 to be suspicious. In 1992 there was no test to find succinylcholine in dead bodies, so Mr. Williams could not be charged with multiple murders until 2002, when such a test was available.
In the end Mr. Williams was acquitted in 2003 because it seems that succinylcholine can be a byproduct of embalming dead bodies, and so no definitive forensic proof could be presented during his trial due to the fact that none of his victims were autopsied immediately after their deaths. However, he did lose his nursing license in the 90's, so he has not had any opportunity to kill more people. As far as I know, Mr. Williams lives somewhere in St. Louis.
One of those suspicious deaths was my mother's. The FBI knocked on my father's door without warning one day in September 1992 to tell him about their suspicions, and I just happened to be visiting him that day. It was the first time we heard about it - the VA never contacted us even once. My father did not want to have my mother exhumed, so he asked the FBI agents if they really needed her body, and they said "Not really, we already exhumed 13 other people." I know now that my father's decision was a mistake because she WAS autopsied and she was NOT embalmed. By the time I heard about the trial in 2004, it was too late to do anything about it.
And don't get me started about the VA's autopsy procedures. My mother took multiple heart medicines, pain killers, blood pressure medications and blood-thinners for 47 years due to having suffered mitral valve damage after contracting rheumatic fever in 1945 while nursing at an Army hospital, and all those medications can cause significant liver damage. The VA pathologist's first autopsy report stated that she died from "Cirrhosis of the liver due to chronic alcoholism." He clearly didn't even look at her medical records, so my father had to force the VA to re-examine the autopsy results and issue a new death certificate stating the correct cause of death, which was "congestive heart failure." Or so we thought at the time...nobody at the VA ever said a word to us about the suspicious deaths on Ward 4E, which was the Cardiac Ward where Mr. Williams worked at the time she died. She was actually recovering from a serious case of pneumonia, and so we were surprised that she died suddenly "during the night" on one of the rare nights when neither my father nor I was present at her side.
I met Dr. Christensen in 2016 and he told me that the VA Director had actually reported his suspicions and statistical reports to the top brass at the VA, who told him to DO NOTHING and SAY NOTHING, otherwise he would be risking his job and his pension, and so Mr. Kurzejeski just sat back and let dozens more people die.
QM, once you beat that ridiculous murder charge, I long for the rest of your life to be healthy, peaceful, and prosperous. You deserve the best in life, and I hope you get it one day.
Why thank you! I was planning on a peaceful, prosperous retirement, and they fucked that up, but I intend to get it back. When you're 30 and planning your retirement, nobody says to you "Be sure to plan on having an extra $200,000 just in case you get falsely arrested for murder."
You are correct, many commonly prescribed medications can cause significant liver damage. Additionally, cirrhosis can be brought on by many other factors, both genetic and environmental. Try telling this to anyone when you present with cirrhosis. Both my MIL and her grandson developed cirrhosis of the liver due to a genetic defect resulting in Biliary dyskinesia, a motility disorder that affects the gallbladder and sphincter of Oddi Her grandson's condition was further exacerbated by hepatitis C which he contracted during surgery at a military hospital overseas Neither were drinkers or intravenous drug users, but we played hell trying to get many so called "medical professionals" to believe this. Often treatment was delayed or not even offered because there was this constant attitude that. "They're drunks and only getting what they deserve" The whole course of their treatment was unbelievable, intolerable and quite frankly maddening.
OMG. What a terrible situation to be in. My mother had about 4 alcoholic drinks per year - on her birthday when we took her out to eat, on Mother's Day when we took her out to eat, and at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners she'd have 1 small glass of wine. My father and I prepared a very long and detailed report, with charts, on all the medications she had taken over the years, which we had to do using the paper version of the Physicians Desk Reference because it was pre-Internet days, and then present a bound copy of our report to the VA's Director. All this information was in her VA medical chart, which was about 2" thick.
And the moral of this story is "never believe any autopsy report from the VA."
I hope there are murder charges in his future.
FWIW I knew this doc professionally. He was better (and less arrogant) than many other transplant surgeons. I cannot imagine what happened but will reserve judgment until more info comes out.
I also know the hospital well, and it was always a more ethical place than most hospitals, and more ethical than many of its competitors in the Houston Medical Center. (The largest medical center in the world, I feel compelled to add, in true Texas style.) It had a lot of Medicaid patients, while some of the more famous hospitals there will not take Medicaid patients at all...(they would close their emergency room permanently if it leads to a smaller profit margin for a billion dollar 'nonprofit'...) Factor in that Texas refuses Medicaid expansion, and its reimbursement is atrocious, and you see how any hospital in Texas that takes it deserves credit. Bottom line: closing the whole program is a tragedy.
This is going to present a golden opportunity for Keith Morrison to ask his probing (ubiquitous) question to a victim of a crime: "What did it feeeel like?"
I used to work on a transplant ward and doctors have ALL the power over who get transplants. Mainly for tairly sensible reasons- there's no sense giving perfectly good organs to people with, say, unmanaged diabetes (high blood sugar is a major cause of transplants, now you know) or drug addictions they don't want to kick. But yeah, all of that has to be charted ACCURATELY- when a surgeon inevitably winds up in court for malpractice, she needs to be be able to point to the evidence of why this patient was not a good transplant risk in her charting & how it lines up with nurses' charts (which are separate) and other hospital records.
One of my patients who was refused a transplant was in his early 20s; he'd already lost one donor kidney due to not taking care of it and when I met him he had serious abdominal issues and was refusing everything except narcotics- even having his vitals done, until we told him we couldn't give him pain meds without vitals. I asked him why he wasn't making an effort, basically, and he told me he was sick of being sick. I empathise so deeply- I mean, imagine having a kidney transplant in your teens & having what seem like endless restrictions when you just want to be like your friends. But I also understand why they denied him.
Anyone who plays with people's lives like this deserves to be done for murder. I won't say the death penalty, although God knows it would be a much fairer use, if they could get it right, than throwing it at every poor dumb asshole who pulls the trigger in an armed robbery and immediately regrets it. But doing this to people just because you can is murder.
I was wondering god complex. Like those people somehow did not "deserve" a new liver in his head.
or
Can't imagine he gets more money from not doing transplants but maybe he is taking bribes from rich people to goose things
It’s always follow the money. Get a CFE to do an analysis of that doctors income from dialysis vs. transplants I had to do exactly that one time and it was very clear, there’s more income in dialysis.
Stories like this make me a little more grateful that there is seemingly no organ transplant history on either side of my family.
"Which brings me again to my guiding question — SERIOUSLY, WHAT THE FUCK?"
SMH.
I have also been thinking about the fact that when something like this happens, almost inevitably we find that more than one person had suspicions or knew, but didn’t do anything because they didn’t want to risk their own ass. Very rare that somebody is such an absolute genius that their behavior goes totally undetected before they finally get caught.
What's the difference between God and a doctor?
God doesn't think he's a doctor.
Seriously though, this is such a heartbreaking story. There has to be something they can do to make sure this can never happen again.
I wonder how Houston organizes its organ donation program?
I had a kidney transplant.
When things got bad enough, I got to list at one hospital and once I started dialysis, I listed at another hospital.
Living in South Jersey, I listed at a Philly hospital and an NJ hospital. They use different donor networks. Philly gets organs from Gift of Life. NJ gets organs from Sharing Network. These are third party nonprofits, which are independent of individual hospitals.
When listing, I met with a doctor from the hospital who worked in the transplant department. Not the surgeon, just a doctor to supervise things. I didn’t meet this doctor again. I had to go through some physicals to show I’m healthy enough to receive an organ transplant before getting on the transplant list. It’s a major surgery that puts stress on the body, and I needed to be healthy enough to tolerate the surgery.
The transplant department wanted monthly bloodwork until a donor was found, living or deceased. The doctor I first met reviewed these labs to make whatever markers they looked for that affected compatibility with possible donors hadn’t changed. I had an annual in person follow-up to check on my health with a PA (pre-COVID). The only doctor I saw was my nephrologist, who handled my dialysis treatment. In NJ, dialysis treatment requires the patient to have a doctor for the treatment. The doctor adjusts the parameters of the dialysis treatment based on lab tests that were drawn every two weeks. Usually met my doctor at the dialysis center once a month to go over things.
No where in this process was a transplant surgeon involved, until the day I got a call that a matching deceased donor kidney was available. After I agreed to use the kidney, the transplant surgeon became involved in further evaluating the kidney before transplant and performing the surgery.
The hospital and surgeon and any individual in the transplant department did not have any direct input in deciding whether or not I remained on the transplant list after I listed, unless there was an actual medical condition that would’ve prevented me from remaining on the list.
Ta, Robyn. This is horrid. As many of you know, all my clients are HIV positive. One of the things I do is educate them on how to care for themselves. I spend quite a bit of time educating them on liver health, because they need the healthiest liver possible to detoxify the drugs they must take daily. Many of them use cocaine/crack and/or drink alcohol. No matter how often they hear me say the two worst drugs for the liver are cocaine and alcohol, they haven't found the will to give them up. Still, I never give up on them; I wish all of them the greatest health they can achieve and the deepest peace they can feel. With their health concerns, I doubt any of them would qualify medically for a transplant, even if we could get Medicaid to pay for one.
Congress really needs to expand Medicare to pay for all other solid organ transplants and not just kidneys.
It’d help a lot of people to have less stress in an already stressful situation.
Reread 'Coma' required or a date with the lovely young Geneviève Bujold in the 1978 movie version.
or 4. he was knocking them off the list to move patients up the list who he felt deserved the livers more/paid him.
You might be interested in the story of nurse Richard Allen Williams who was charged with killing 10 patients at Truman VA hospital in Columbia, Missouri in 1992. It is believed that he killed dozens more there, and dozens more at the nursing home in Sedalia where he worked before taking the VA Hospital job. He always worked the night shift, and allegedly he injected patients with the muscle relaxant succinylcholine to stop their breathing. He allegedly had some kind of God Complex and believed he was sparing the patients' families from pain and suffering. That's just a guess, because he never admitted it.
Dr. Gordon Christensen, who was acting chief of staff and second in command of the Truman VA hospital at the time, found patients were 10 times more likely to die while Williams was on duty. He reported his suspicions to the hospital director, J.L. Kurzejeski, but Mr. Kurzejeski repeatedly refused to call the FBI.
And so when nothing happened for several months, Dr. Christensen reported his suspicions to the FBI himself, who opened an investigation. The VA retaliated against Dr. Christensen as a whistleblower, and he found a new position with the University of Missouri Hospital (right across the street from the VA Hospital). Dr. Christensen died in 2020 at the age of 71.
The only action the VA director took was to transfer Mr. Williams to a non-patient-care position, from which Mr. Williams soon resigned. He was then hired at a nursing home in nearby small town of Ashland, where he allegedly killed dozens more people.
The FBI spent five years looking into 43 deaths on the hospital floor where Williams worked and found 33 to be suspicious. In 1992 there was no test to find succinylcholine in dead bodies, so Mr. Williams could not be charged with multiple murders until 2002, when such a test was available.
In the end Mr. Williams was acquitted in 2003 because it seems that succinylcholine can be a byproduct of embalming dead bodies, and so no definitive forensic proof could be presented during his trial due to the fact that none of his victims were autopsied immediately after their deaths. However, he did lose his nursing license in the 90's, so he has not had any opportunity to kill more people. As far as I know, Mr. Williams lives somewhere in St. Louis.
One of those suspicious deaths was my mother's. The FBI knocked on my father's door without warning one day in September 1992 to tell him about their suspicions, and I just happened to be visiting him that day. It was the first time we heard about it - the VA never contacted us even once. My father did not want to have my mother exhumed, so he asked the FBI agents if they really needed her body, and they said "Not really, we already exhumed 13 other people." I know now that my father's decision was a mistake because she WAS autopsied and she was NOT embalmed. By the time I heard about the trial in 2004, it was too late to do anything about it.
And don't get me started about the VA's autopsy procedures. My mother took multiple heart medicines, pain killers, blood pressure medications and blood-thinners for 47 years due to having suffered mitral valve damage after contracting rheumatic fever in 1945 while nursing at an Army hospital, and all those medications can cause significant liver damage. The VA pathologist's first autopsy report stated that she died from "Cirrhosis of the liver due to chronic alcoholism." He clearly didn't even look at her medical records, so my father had to force the VA to re-examine the autopsy results and issue a new death certificate stating the correct cause of death, which was "congestive heart failure." Or so we thought at the time...nobody at the VA ever said a word to us about the suspicious deaths on Ward 4E, which was the Cardiac Ward where Mr. Williams worked at the time she died. She was actually recovering from a serious case of pneumonia, and so we were surprised that she died suddenly "during the night" on one of the rare nights when neither my father nor I was present at her side.
I met Dr. Christensen in 2016 and he told me that the VA Director had actually reported his suspicions and statistical reports to the top brass at the VA, who told him to DO NOTHING and SAY NOTHING, otherwise he would be risking his job and his pension, and so Mr. Kurzejeski just sat back and let dozens more people die.
http://murderpedia.org/male.W/w/williams-richard-allen.htm
https://www.columbiatribune.com/story/news/military/veterans/2020/03/04/va-whistleblower-christensen-dies-at/1585875007/
Was this the basis for an episode from one of the "true crime" shows? The details seem awfully familiar (and horrifying) to me.
I haven't heard of any TV show based on this story, but it wouldn't surprise me.
QM, once you beat that ridiculous murder charge, I long for the rest of your life to be healthy, peaceful, and prosperous. You deserve the best in life, and I hope you get it one day.
Why thank you! I was planning on a peaceful, prosperous retirement, and they fucked that up, but I intend to get it back. When you're 30 and planning your retirement, nobody says to you "Be sure to plan on having an extra $200,000 just in case you get falsely arrested for murder."
You are correct, many commonly prescribed medications can cause significant liver damage. Additionally, cirrhosis can be brought on by many other factors, both genetic and environmental. Try telling this to anyone when you present with cirrhosis. Both my MIL and her grandson developed cirrhosis of the liver due to a genetic defect resulting in Biliary dyskinesia, a motility disorder that affects the gallbladder and sphincter of Oddi Her grandson's condition was further exacerbated by hepatitis C which he contracted during surgery at a military hospital overseas Neither were drinkers or intravenous drug users, but we played hell trying to get many so called "medical professionals" to believe this. Often treatment was delayed or not even offered because there was this constant attitude that. "They're drunks and only getting what they deserve" The whole course of their treatment was unbelievable, intolerable and quite frankly maddening.
OMG. What a terrible situation to be in. My mother had about 4 alcoholic drinks per year - on her birthday when we took her out to eat, on Mother's Day when we took her out to eat, and at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners she'd have 1 small glass of wine. My father and I prepared a very long and detailed report, with charts, on all the medications she had taken over the years, which we had to do using the paper version of the Physicians Desk Reference because it was pre-Internet days, and then present a bound copy of our report to the VA's Director. All this information was in her VA medical chart, which was about 2" thick.
And the moral of this story is "never believe any autopsy report from the VA."
Sorry for your loss.
Life's hard enough without these cruel criminals.
Thank you. I rarely think about it because even if he had been convicted, it wouldn't bring my mother back.
As to the possible reasons why this asshat did this, I would guess aot,k.