Kathie Gagne died 4,476 days ago.

Waiting
May 7th, 2013 @ 9:21 am

At 6:22 AM attorney Kelly Mathis replied to my email from last night. He wrote:

 

Not yet. We have left a message and are still awaiting a return call.

Kelly

 

I replied at 7:27 AM with:

 

I don’t understand, Kelly. That’s absurd. How long are we going to wait?

 

Then at 8:21 AM I called the law offices of Mathis & Murphy, P.A. and asked to speak with Jennifer. She was very nice and polite, of course. I explained to her that I was upset with Kelly’s response, that it seemed like he didn’t realize how long I’ve been waiting and how many times over the last few months I’ve been told to just wait one more day (or week, or two weeks).

Jennifer said she understood. She told me the name of the counsel for Woodland Terrace is James Morrison and that he is in West Palm Beach. She said she called him already once today and that she would call him again in two hours.

I asked her how long we were going to wait before getting a judge to order Woodland Terrace to deliver my mother’s medical records, because clearly they were not going to do anything until compelled. Jennifer said she would discuss that with Kelly and get a “hard deadline”, and she asked me to call her in about three hours to follow up. I told her I would do that.

Yet Another Day
May 6th, 2013 @ 1:47 pm

I went to bed last night hoping against hope that today, Monday, I’d finally get a response to my months and months of trying to obtain copies of mom’s medical records.

At 1:47PM my time — 4:47PM in Florida — I sent this email to attorney Kelly Mathis, in reply to his message to me on Friday, in which he said he was going to follow up today:

 

Hello, Kelly,

Were you able to get in touch with the attorney from Woodland Terrace today?

David Vincent Gagne

 

I refuse to give up.

Claim investigation
May 3rd, 2013 @ 11:52 am

Just before lunch on Friday, May 3rd, I sent a follow-up to my previous email to attorney Kelly Mathis. I wrote:

 

Hi, Kelly,

Unless the attorney for Woodland Terrace has complied with the request and you simply haven’t updated me yet, it’s now been more than three full weeks that we have been waiting.

Can I please get a status update? What do we do now?

I am trying very hard not to sound desperate, and even harder to not annoy to you.

Thank you sincerely,

 

He replied to me at 2:42 PM:

 

David,

I have not received anything. We will follow up on Monday.

Kelly

 
Goodbye, Jill
April 30th, 2013 @ 4:01 pm

Jill Bechtold of Mathis & Murphy, P.A. finally replied to my desperate email pleas at the end of April:

 

Sent: April 30, 2013 @ 4:01 PM PDT

David

I have forwarded your email correspondence to Kelly, the managing partner on the case. I have accepted a new position at a different law firm and will no longer be working on your matter. Kelly is aware of the status of your case and will be able to properly respond to your concerns moving forward.

You are in the best of hands with Kelly and I wish your whole family best wishes moving forward.

-Jill

 

I replied:

 

Sent: May 3, 2013 @ 11:45 AM PDT

Thanks, Jill.

I wish you good luck at your new firm; it was very nice working with you.

 
Still Trying to Obtain Medical Records
April 30th, 2013 @ 2:59 pm

Mathis and Murphy, P.A.It’s been almost nine months since mom died and I am still trying to obtain copies of her medical records from Woodland Terrace. The attorney for Woodland Terrace was notified by Mathis & Murphy, P.A. on April 10th that I am now (finally) officially recognized by the State of Florida to be the legal representative of Kathleen A. Gagne. That was over three weeks ago and, as far as I know, we have yet to receive a response from them of any kind. (Mathis & Murphy, P.A. is the second law firm I’ve had working on this.)

At the beginning of this week I was informed that the lawyer at Mathis & Murphy who had been working on the case had left their firm. The case is now being handled by Kelly Mathis himself. Upon being informed of this, I sent this email as a reply to him:

 

Dear Kelly,

Yes, on April 10th — almost exactly one month after Jill told me to wait one week — Jill sent me a copy of an “ORDER ON ADMINISTRATION AND APPOINTING PERSONAL REPRESENTATIVE” from the Seventh Judicial Court for Volusia County, Florida, Probate Division, which she said she had forwarded to the attorney for Woodland Terrace.

I asked Jill what the next step was and she said we should allow two weeks for the attorney from Woodland Terrace to provide my mother’s medical records to your firm.

Two weeks later — on April 22nd — I asked Jill how much longer we should wait for a response. She replied and said that she had contacted the Woodland Terrace attorney and he told her, “we should have something by the end of this week,” which I interpreted to mean the 25th or 26th.

On the 25th I wrote Jill and got no response. I waited until yesterday, the 29th, to try again. She didn’t respond to that email, so this morning (April 30th) I sent a follow-up and copied Ms. Workman, who called me this morning to let me know Jill was no longer with your firm.

My mother died eight months and three weeks ago, and I have not made it a single day since then without breaking down at least once in tears over the intolerable, insulting, unfair, and despicable way her life ended much too prematurely.

Since the day she was first institutionalized — December 1, 2011 — I have spent countless hours working on her behalf, desperately trying to get just one person to care, to follow through on his or her promises, to do the right thing. Now she is dead, but I refuse to stop fighting for her.

I look forward to working with you, and I have no reservations at all if you need me to go through every step again. I will gladly give you every detail you need.

Thank you sincerely,

David Vincent Gagne

 
Trust, But Verify
April 11th, 2013 @ 3:05 pm

pillsNPR just posted a story with the headline Seniors In The South Are More Apt To Be Prescribed Risky Drugs. If you have followed any part of my mother’s story for the last year or two, you know that I firmly believe this to be true. Nobody anywhere should ever blindly trust a doctor. Doctors aren’t magicians or gods. They’re people, just like everyone else. They make mistakes often and they are frequently heavily influenced by financial matters which have nothing to do with healthcare.

If you are prescribed a drug, you should do your own research on it.

And, perhaps even more importantly, if your parents are being prescribed medications, you should research them, too. Find out why they’re being prescribed, what alternatives the doctor has considered, and what their potential side effects are.

Seton Hill Alumni Relations
March 26th, 2013 @ 8:51 am

This morning I received a response from the Director of Alumni Relations at Seton Hill University.

 

Seton Hill UniversityDavid,

I am very sorry to learn of the recent death of your mother.

I apologize for the delay in my response but thank you for your inquiry regarding information about your mother’s attendance at Seton Hill. I was able to confirm with our registrar that she was at Seton Hill from the fall of 1966 through the fall of 1968. I contacted our archives for possible photos or previous articles that she wrote for our Setonian newspaper. I attach some electronic copies of what we were able to discover. I hope this is helpful.

 

Attached were six scans from the newspaper, which you can see here. (And, man! I bet she was ticked to see her name spelled with a Y instead of an IE in the paper!)

Continue reading …

Seton Hill
March 16th, 2013 @ 2:38 pm

Seton Hill UniversitySeton Hill University in Pennsylvania has — sadly — been in the news all day today. 1 It’s a strange coincidence, because for my whole life I thought mom had attended Seton Hall University. 2 It was only a few days ago that I found a few ancient copies of her student newspaper, The Setonian, and realized my misunderstanding. (She’d saved them because they contained articles she had written!) 3

I know that mom didn’t ever graduate from Seton Hill; she told us she dropped out of college because she was homesick. 4 But I thought it might be worth contacting the alumni office to see if they could tell me anything about her time there. I went to the school’s website today and sent this email to the address listed for alumni relations:

 

To Whom It May Concern,

My mother Kathleen Gagne passed away in August of 2012.

She was a student at Seton Hill at some point in the 1960s, when her name was still Kathleen Albanese. (She preferred Kathie but people frequently spelled her name as Kathy.)

She was born on September 22, 1948 and her social security number was [redacted].

I know that she wrote for the student newspaper; I found at least two issues of The Setonian featuring articles she had written, although I do not have the dates.

I am looking for any information you can provide: transcripts, enrollment dates, classes taken, photographs, etc.

Anything at all you could find would be tremendously appreciated, and I am happy to pay for any postage.

Sincerely,
David Vincent Gagne

 

1 A bus carrying the women’s lacrosse team crashed, killing two people, including the head coach.
2 Seton Hall is in New Jersey.
3 I never knew she wrote for her college student newspaper!
4 She returned to college and got her degree from the University of Central Florida at the age of fifty.

Autopsy Results
March 8th, 2013 @ 9:17 am

On March 8th of 2013 I sent the following email to my attorney and my sister:

 

Dear Jill,

I just published this to my mom’s website:

http://kathiegagne.com/2012/09/27/any-update/

I am just now realizing that I was told repeatedly by Dr. Wolf and by Attorney Phillips that Dr. Wolf would not be able to finalize my mother’s autopsy until and unless she received copies of my mother’s medical records from Woodland Terrace. To the best of my knowledge she was never given those records, and yet she did finalize the autopsy.

This discrepancy is troubling me very much. Does this mean that the autopsy Dr. Wolf provided should be considered incomplete and / or inconclusive?

All of the news lately about the 87-year old woman in Bakersfield, CA who died in a nursing home after the nurses and staff refused to perform CPR has also made me realize that — because I was in such a state of shock — I never thought to ask if anyone at Woodland Terrace made any attempts to help my mother.

Also note this post: http://kathiegagne.com/2012/08/12/evacuated-to-the-emergency-room/

I have always had questions about what happened between when exactly my mother was found “unresponsive” and when she arrived at the hospital. And I have always questioned why Nurse Alvis told me that she was not able to detail what happened during that time because — she told me — she was busy preparing paperwork and my mother’s chart to go to the hospital, yet everyone at the hospital who spoke with me stressed that they received no paperwork or information at all whatsoever with my mother.

Detective Whittier of the Deland Police Department had questions about all this, too, and seemed at first to be very engaged in determining what had happened. But after a week or two he simply completely stopped responding to my phone calls and I was never able to get in touch with him again.

Thank you sincerely,

 

My attorney replied about an hour later:

 

David and Jennifer,

Unfortunately I think that most of these questions will not be answered fully until we get the records and see what is there and what isn’t. We should be able to tell when she became unresponsive and her true condition during admission to the hospital. We may be able to tell if Dr. Wolf got copies of the records to base her opinion or if she executed the autopsy without them. We just don’t know right now.

I know a lot of questions are arising as more time passes, but none of the answers will likely appear until we get the records. I know this doesn’t help much (if at all). I am sorry I can’t offer more answers at this point.

-Jill

 
Re: Documents
February 26th, 2013 @ 9:46 am
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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