I called Dr. Wolf on my way to work this morning. I was concerned because I started wondering if the reason Dr. Peele had refused to sign the death certificate was because he was waiting for the results of the autopsy, and I wanted to make sure that Dr. Wolf would not share the results with anyone but me.
It took me a minute to get her on the phone because for some reason I have five different phone numbers for her. Eventually I managed to talk to her, though, and she was very kind and caring. She asked how I was doing and was very compassionate when I explained how hard this has been.
I asked her if she would share her email address with me, because I wanted to give her access to this website and I had several PDF copies of medical records that I could send her. She told me that she never used her email address for anything work-related because the state of Florida has very broad and liberal public records laws and anything anyone emails is “discoverable”. (She repeated nearly verbatim the long disclaimer printed at the bottom of almost every email I’ve received from any government employee in the state.) I mentioned that my attorney had told me he’d emailed her an email from me, and she said that he had. So I don’t know what to make of that contradiction.
Finally I explained that I did not want her to share the results of her findings with anyone. She said that she was not sure, but she thought that any autopsy performed in the state of Florida was de facto a matter of public record.
I told her, and asked her to pardon my French, that the state of Florida could go fuck itself. If the state of Florida wanted to know exactly what killed my mother, the state of Florida should have performed an autopsy. Since the state refused and forced me to pay for one on my own, they would have to take me to court if they wanted to know the results. She told me that she would respect my wishes, but that she would have to comply with the law. I told her that I didn’t really care what the law said and repeated that the state would need to pay for it if they wanted to know. She told me that she would not share the results with anyone but me and my lawyer, and I feel like I can trust her. (I am certainly going to talk to my lawyer about it, though.)
I asked her if she had an ETA on the findings, and she said that it usually took four to six weeks to get the toxicology results back from the lab. She told me that she did talk to my attorney just yesterday, and that he told her he had subpoenaed the medical records for her. She apologized that the process was taking so long, and I told her that I was much more concerned that everything was done correctly than that it was done quickly. I told her that I had simply not heard from anyone in over a week, and that I had been conditioned over the last year to not have any faith in anyone caring about my mother except me. She said she understood and promised that she would keep me updated.
The phone call lasted fourteen minutes.