I sent this email to Sophia Mas at Stewart-Marchman a day after a very long and difficult phone call with her and Dr. Caliendo.

Dr. Caliendo was only on the phone for a few minutes and then Sophia called us and explained in detail what he had been saying. It wasn’t until many, many months later that we learned that almost everything she told us was apparently grossly incorrect.

Sophia,

Thank you very much for calling yesterday after our conference call to further explain the results of my mother’s CT scan.

I think that many of our conversations over the last three weeks, and our approach to all of this, would have been dramatically different if we had known that my mother had had a stroke (or multiple strokes).

Yesterday both you and Dr. Caliendo indicated that the CT scan to which you were referring was performed on December 1. Do you know why it took almost three full weeks for someone to explain to us the results? My sister and I — and others — have been overwhelmed with grief and confusion for almost a month now because of my mother’s sudden negative change in personality and cognitive function. Because nobody explained the findings of the CT scan to us, we have (likely mistakenly) assumed that my mother’s condition was psychological and — hopefully — temporary, or at the very least something which could be in some way managed with some combination of therapy and drugs.

To learn that we were so terribly misinformed has been heartbreaking and difficult. I’m just trying to understand why nobody told us anything weeks ago. 1

Thank you,

David Vincent Gagne

1 As of July 28, 2012 and even after repeated attempts, I still have not been given any explanation at all of why it took them three fucking weeks to tell us all this. And I still have not had anyone explain how they could have been so dramatically wrong about it all. A half dozen doctors have all analyzed my mother’s brain in the months since then and they have all told me that there are no signs of her ever having experienced a stroke and there is no evidence at all of brain damage. The most likely answer is that Dr. Caliendo and / or Sophia Mas were looking at the wrong chart during this conversation, which is a mistake that multiple people at Stewart-Marchman did multiple times during mom’s stay there.