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About me
Wednesday 20 November 21:52:51 1732161171
I am - to use the title of the last job I had - a sixty-eight-year-old retired systems architect. I had it for eighteen years
or so and probably would have continued working at for several more years had I not fallen into the hands of the Medical Industry.
Except for a couple of brief periods of unemployment - about five or six weeks in each case - I have been working and paying taxes
since I was about seventeen. I have never received any kind of government assistance, even when I was unemployed I did not apply
for unemployment benefits. I have never committed a crime or any legal transgression beyond a traffic infraction or two.
I served for four years in the U. S. Air Force and had a stellar record - straight nine APRs, a commendation medal and promotion to
E-5 in the minimum time allowed by regulations. I passed an investigation for a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI)
security clearance. I was often assigned special duties requiring a person of my specialty with such a clearance.
After my brief military service I worked in the IT industry as it is called these days. I worked for three companies and was a top-level
key person in each. One was a division of a multi-billion dollar company and the final one involved building a mom-and-pop business into
one with millions in annual revenue.
I have never - in sixty five years - been diagnosed with any sort of mental illness or even suspected of or recommended for examination
for such a condition. In the three years since the events described herein I have not been suspected of any mental illness even though
the treatment to which I was subjected can in fact cause such injury.
In other words I am about as normal as any person you will ever meet and am not given to conspiracy theories or imagining things. I can
provide numerous witnesses to confirm this. I say all of this because if I were presented with the following narrative I would be tempted
to believe that it was at the very least exaggerated if not complete fabrication. As it happens I can prove every word of it.
On 15 December 2020 - a month before my sixty-fifth birthday - I did the same things I had been doing for years. Upon awakening I did
a hundred pushups on the floor beside my bed. I had a glass of orange juice and a bowl of whole oats with no additives followed by a
cup of black coffee. As was my wont I arrived at work about fifteen minutes early and entered the building by an enclosed stairwell
near the parking lot. The stair was in two sections at a right angle with a landing at the top of each half. When leaving I would often
descend by holding the rails as far as I could reach while standing on the landing and jump to the landing below. I only did it when
I was alone as it scared the hell out of people. The point is to illustrate my physical condition.
It was a rare day that I did not find as least one person waiting to ask me something. With that taken care of I would go to my office.
My salary was decent at about 120K with quarterly incentives averaging three to four thousand per quarter. I could have made more
elsewhere but was doing it because I enjoyed it and wasn't interested in moving to a larger city with retirement only a few years away.
If my attention wasn't demanded by something urgent I would go downstairs to visit a friend who supervised a small department. We were
friends from way back and would chat for while over another cup of coffee. On this occasion I suddenly had a sharp pain and within a few
minutes was unconscious.
I didn't wake up for sixty-something days and would not leave the last of three hospitals for another thirty days after I woke up.
I was later told by my friend that an ambulance was called and I was transported to the hospital. It is a decent-sized hospital for a
city of that size but does not have complex procedures such as heart surgery. Suspecting a problem with my heart they performed a
cardiac catheterization and things went south in a hurry. The dye used in the procedure causes kidney damage in some people and I had
the misfortune to be one of them. It takes a little while for it to happen and after being transported to a larger hospital in another
city and the need for a coronary artery bypass graft was diagnosed and the surgery performed successfully.
The next day I had a heart attack. According to the records I had no heartbeat or breathing for twelve minutes (attempts at CPR and
doing a tracheostomy) and was diagnosed with an anoxic encephalopathy. When I became conscious again I was apparently in severe pain
and was sedated to keep me still. One of my siblings who was present suggested that it might be the dye.
It was and it had wrecked my kidneys. This was my third day in the hospital and for the next twenty-seven days I was sedated and dialysis
was administered. On 15 January 2021 - my sixty-fifth birthday - I was taken to a third hospital. Someone, I believe a nurse, commented
to one of my siblings that they should expect me to be normal brain-wise if I ever woke up.
Arkansas Continued Care Hospital (ACCH) - defunct since November 2024 or thereabouts - was located in an old hospital plant in Jonesboro. It
was originally the Methodist Hospital of Jonesboro but had been closed for quite a while. Beginning in 2014 it was occupied by the
NEA Baptist hospital while a new facility was being built. NEA Baptist vacated it in 2016 and it remained empty until it was occupied
by ACCH.
The hospital should have been in reasonably good condition as NEA Baptist would have made the necessary repairs and improvements to
have it function properly but it had been vacant for two years. It was in pretty bad shape when I arrived - dirty, non-functional
equipment and with a staff that must have been from the bottom of the barrel. I know for a fact that the one and only doctor was either
incompetent beyond belief or part of a scheme to hold patients by incapacitating them and milk the insurance companies or Medicare.
Maybe both.
ACCH described itself as a 'long term acute care hospital'. There is no such thing. It was a rehabilitation and recovery facility and
no acutely ill or injured patient should have been there. There were no intensive care or critical care rooms or personel qualified to
staff them. No surgery was performed there and no emergency (accident victims or others with potentially life-threatening conditions)
and the emergency room was in any case not functional or staffed. A patient developing a potentially life-threatening condition should
have immediately been transferred to a regular hospital. Statistically no patient death should have occurred there yet during five years
of operation an average of thirty patients died there each year.
One can only speculate as to the reason but ACCH was a long-term care facility operating under special laws designed to benefit such
facilities. One of the requirements to qualify was an average patient stay of 25 days. Thus if a patient was there for less than 25 days
the deficit had to be made up with other patients. In my case they kept me for 68 days by drugging me senseless and telling my family
that I was either brain-damaged or mentally ill.
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