When 41-year-old Akola Wayne fell in her yard at Melanie Damishana and broke her leg just over a week ago, she possibly considered that she would be inactive for a while. Neither she nor any of her family or relatives would have imagined that two leg fractures would have led to her losing her life. Yet that is precisely what happened.
What has been revealed about Ms Wayne’s travails following her injury defies logic. Right after she fell, Ms Wayne was taken to the Georgetown Public Hospital. One imagines that the hospital was overrun with seriously injured people who would have been bleeding copiously or dying because it took hours for Ms Wayne to be seen by a doctor. After x-rays—one assumes that this was how it was determined that she had sustained not one but two fractures to her left leg—the attending medical practitioner(s) determined that there was no urgency to set her fractures and immobilize the leg in Plaster of Paris to begin the healing process. Instead, incredibly, as her sister told this newspaper, the leg was strapped to a piece of cardboard and Ms Wayne was sent home to return the next day to undergo surgery. She was also given some painkillers.
A fracture is no easy thing, as anyone who has ever had one knows. In fact even a bad sprain can be extremely painful. One cannot help but wonder at the agony Ms Wayne would have endured getting into a taxi with her two fractures and travelling to the city, then getting back into another one to travel some 11 miles back to Melanie Damishana, knowing she would have to repeat the process the next day. A mother of nine, she obviously could not afford to visit a private institution instead, where, no doubt, she would have received the treatment she needed right away.
What happened next was not just mind-boggling, but callous to the extreme. Back at the public hospital early the next day, Ms Wayne was again made to wait hours to be seen. How this could have happened when she was told the day before that she would be undergoing surgery has not yet been revealed, but it did. And just like the day before, Ms Wayne would have been in excruciating pain as the pain medication she had been given was finished. It seems that no one cared, because when, hours later, she was finally able to see a doctor—and one hopes it was not the same doctor she had seen the day before—she was given what appears to be a cursory examination only and told to go home and return again the next day. Her pleas that she needed more pain medication were seemingly ignored.
While, according to her sister, she was given some treatment for high blood pressure on her first visit, it appears that no monitoring of this was done on her second visit.
Before she made it back to her East Coast home Ms Wayne had suffered what appeared to be a loss of consciousness. But she refused when asked if she wanted to return to the hospital. This is understandable, given her prior experiences. However, by the time she actually got home it was clear that whether she wanted to or not she would have to be taken back to the hospital. Not long after this was done, she died.
A post-mortem examination has since determined that she died of cardiac arrest. And the GPH had announced that it was conducting an investigation into the circumstances that led to her demise. While this is necessary, it is clear, even without an investigation that there was a lot that was—at the very least—done incorrectly when Ms Wayne visited the hospital. For one thing, while it is not known whether Ms Wayne knew she had an underlying heart condition, a proper triage and initial physician’s examination, which clearly included a blood pressure check, would have indicated that there was something wrong—apart from her obvious injuries. She was, according to her sister, given “drips because she had high blood pressure.”
The pain from her injury would have caused Ms Wayne’s blood pressure to rise, and since from what her sister said, she may have already had hypertension, this means it would have spiked even higher. Surely, this was one reason to admit her so that the pressure could be monitored in the hospital overnight. It is known that surgery is hardly if ever performed when a person’s blood pressure is high. Therefore, if Ms Wayne was to have surgery the next day, the logical course of action, one assumes, would have been to ensure she was resting in the hospital, which likely may have allowed her BP to drop to a safe level for surgery.
Apart from that, one cannot help but wonder at the insensitivity of a medical professional who would look at a woman with two leg fractures and send her all the way back to Melanie Damishana to return the next day. Her address would have been on the medical chart that would have been prepared when she was triaged. Why was there no sympathy for her status and condition?
The result of the investigation being conducted by the hospital will be interesting to say the least. If there was never a clear case for the sanctioning of medical professionals—and there have been several—Ms Wayne’s death surely warrants this course of action. Although with Minister of Public Health George Norton being able to escape sanction for his obviously egregious actions in the drugs bond scandal, one wonders whether this will ever happen.
