Kathleen A. Gagne

Kathie Gagne died 4,512 days ago.

Pulmonary Thromboembolism Associated with Risperidone

September 11th, 2012 @ 11:16 pm

I sent this email to attorney Steve Phillips of Pincus & Currier, LLP on September 11th, 2012:

Dear Steve,

I asked Dr. Wolf if she would share her email address with me and she said that she would not. She said that because of the state of Florida’s broad and liberal public records laws, she did not use her email for any work-related issues. I understand and respect her decision in that regard.

I know, however, that you have her email address. You told me that you forwarded an email from me to her, and she confirmed that she had received that email.

I am asking you to please forward this email (or at least the relevant information below) to her as well.

————————

I did a Google search this evening for:

Risperdal “pulmonary embolism”

Google suggested that I instead search for:

Risperidone “pulmonary embolism”

That search yields about 176,000 results. The very first two results are to articles published on PubMed.gov, the website of the United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. Both of these articles posit clear links to cardiac arrest precipitated by pulmonary thromboembolism associated with risperidone. One of the articles states, “the data suggest that patients receiving risperidone […] are at risk for acute pulmonary thromboembolism, even if otherwise healthy.”

You can read both of those articles using these links:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18281175

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12520151

Thank you sincerely,

Steve replied to me at 10:34 AM on September 12th:

I will get her the info for her consideration.

In case we have to sue the nursing home and use Dr. Wolf as an expert, I don’t want you sending anything to her. We need to keep you isolated from her as much as possible so her opinions are not tainted. If you have something, send it to me and I will forward it to her.

Thanks,

Steve Phillips

I replied to him almost immediately with:

Okay. You got it.

Thanks, Steve.

At 1:10 PM he wrote me to say:

Got a response from her.

She is looking into it.

Certification of Death

September 11th, 2012 @ 5:30 pm

When I got home from work tonight I found an envelope from J.E. Cusack Mortuary.

Inside was a two-page Certification of Death from the State of Florida Office of Vital Statistics.

It’s very official. It’s printed on water-marked paper which looks like it would be nearly impossible to forge.

My mom is listed as the “decedent” and I’m listed as the “informant”.

Under the section titled “CAUSE OF DEATH AND INJURY INFORMATION” it lists PROBABLE MANNER OF DEATH: NATURAL

A Call from Steve

September 11th, 2012 @ 3:30 pm

Attorney Steve Phillips of Pincus & Currier, LLP called me on the afternoon of September 11th, 2012. After a few pleasantries he told me that he had talked to Dr. Wolf the previous day, and that he requested the medical records and insurance information from Woodland Terrace. ¹

Steve said that Dr. Wolf thinks that the pulmonary embolism that killed my mother could potentially be blamed on the nursing home, and that she was unable to relate the medications mom was being administered to the pulmonary embolism. ² I said that I had just talked to Dr. Wolf earlier in the day and she had told me that she hadn’t gotten any toxicology reports back from the lab yet, and likely wouldn’t for several weeks, so I didn’t understand how she could have already decided there was no way to relate the medications to the pulmonary embolism.

I asked Steve which medical records he had subpoenaed, whether he had asked for records from Halifax Hospital or Fish Memorial Hospital as well, and he said that Dr. Wolf had only been interested in medical records for the last thirty days, so he only subpoenaed Woodland Terrace. He said that he also requested the admissions assessment and “plan of care” records.

I explained to Steve that the reason I had called Dr. Wolf that morning was because I wanted to make sure she didn’t share the results of the autopsy — which I was personally paying to have performed — with anyone other than me. I noted how she told me she thought there may be a law about any autopsy performed in the state being a matter of public record and Steve said he thinks that law may have been enacted after the death of NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt. Regardless, he said, someone would have to request the results from her; she wasn’t going to offer them to anyone on her own, and he would tell her that if anyone requested the results from her that she should contact him before complying.

Steve asked me if I wanted him to scan and email me copies of the records from Woodland Terrace and I told him that I very much did, yes. He asked me to email him a reminder to do so next week.

Then he told me that he would be in and out of the office for the next several weeks because he had court cases and depositions in Miami and Naples and one of the other south Florida cities, but that I should call or text message him any time. Steve said that text message was really the fastest and best way to contact him.

I asked him if he had been given any sort of ETA by Woodland Terrace and he told me that by law they had thirty days to provide him with their insurance information, and that it usually takes about a week to get copies of medical records. He said he was certain they would be calling him any day now to let him know what the fees would be to photocopy all of the medical records.

The entire call lasted nine minutes and twenty-six seconds.

Note: As of February 26th, 2013 — just shy of six months later — I still have not been able to get copies of my mother’s medical records from Woodland Terrace.

¹ Steve gave me no indication that he had spoken to Dr. Wolf on this day; I think it was just a coincidence that they both called me on the same day.
² Why Dr. Wolf didn’t mention any of this when we spoke just eight hours before this call is a frustrating mystery to me.

Re: Updates

September 11th, 2012 @ 10:33 am

My sister sent me an email with answers to some of my questions from yesterday:

Hey, David.

[…] Mom needed to be eligible for Social Security Disability to be eligible for Medicaid. They are separate, but somehow one predicates the other.

ChamberlinEdmonds is the company that works through Halifax to assist people in getting Medicaid because the process is so f-ing insane. Chamberlin helps with the process so long as the person is in the hospital. Once Mom went into Coastal, Coastal was supposed to continue the process. I suppose that once Mom went back to Halifax, Chamberlin picked it back up. Then Woodland was supposed to be working on it. I really don’t understand why Chamberlin came back into the picture, but I did see that on the FL DCFS site (Medicaid) that Chamberlin was continuing to receive information letters. I suppose because they have a vested interest in Mom getting the aid because it will give Halifax money. I just called and left Debbie a message asking her to call me back. If you would prefer to call her, her number is [redacted].

[…]

And then she sent another email to me at 11:03 PM to say:

Hey, David.

Debbie Meadows said she would be happy to answer any of your questions. Her email address is: [redacted]
Her voicemail message asks for the name of the hospital in which the case was opened along with the social security number. I suppose you might want to include those in your email for her to reference.

[…]

Still Waiting

September 11th, 2012 @ 9:59 am

I just sent this email to Dr. Cusack of Cusack Mortuary:

Hey Allen,

I’m just checking on the status of my mother’s cremation. On the 6th you said that we might receive her ashes as early as the 7th; I have not heard from you since then and I haven’t received anything.

Is everything okay?

Thanks in advance,

Allen replied at 11:32 AM with:

All is well. I apologize for responding to you. I was out ill a few days with migranes and blood pressure issues. Now that its settled, your mother has been cremated and sent to you. I will find out from Dad what the expected receive date it. I saw to it that she was sent as you requested, but I did not send her out personally. I will let you know what day/date to look for her to arrive home.

I replied to him at 11:36 AM with:

Okay. Thank you very much, Allen.

Medicaid

September 11th, 2012 @ 8:22 am

Just for the hell of it, I sent an email to Delia Mcclain at ElderSource this morning:

Delia,

I have not heard from you in seven months now.

Is this email address still valid? Does my mother still have an open case file with your organization? Can I get a status update?

Any help from you would be appreciated.

Pathology Update

September 11th, 2012 @ 6:56 am

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.

Updates

September 10th, 2012 @ 10:47 pm

My sister sent me an email with information about some of what she’s been handling:

Hi, David.

Debbie Meadows from ChamberlinEdmonds in Orlando called me […]. She said that Medicaid is waiting on Social Security who is waiting for the death certificate. I told her I knew that Social Security was waiting for the death certificate because we were as well. I told her that as soon as you received it, you would be bringing it with your birth certificate to your local Social Security office. She is sending me her information via mail because I will need to send her a copy too. She will then send a copy to Medicaid.

[…]

I called Mom’s student loan provider today, Nelnet. I asked what I needed to do about her loan. Basically, once I have the death certificate, I need to send them a certified copy, and the loan will be “discharged”.

[…] told me that if we get any bills, we should mail them back and write “deceased” on them and that should be enough for some of them.

[…]

I replied at 11:08 PM with:

Hey, [name redacted],

Well, now I’m really confused. Why would Medicaid be waiting on Social Security? I thought they were two completely separate organizations, that Social Security was a federal program and Medicaid was a state program.

And what exactly is ChamberlinEdmonds? That sounds like a private company and not a federal or state institution at all. Why is someone from there our contact person instead of someone with the State of Florida or the United States government? Do you have an email address for this Debbie Meadows?

What prompted you to call Nelnet? I have a few bills from them that went to the post office box […] in Florida. Are you receiving any of mom’s bills there? If so, please let me know about them (even if you are handling them) because I don’t want us both dealing with the same companies simultaneously.

[…]

Medicaid – Approved for Kathleen Gagne

September 10th, 2012 @ 10:42 am

On August 27th, 2012 — two weeks after she died, and after nine months of trying — the State of Florida Department of Children and Families finally approved my mother’s application for Medicaid.

On the afternoon of September 10th, I sent this email to my attorney, Steve Phillips, of Pincus & Currier, LLP:

Steve,

After more than nine months of red tape and phone calls, it appears that the State of Florida finally approved my mother’s Medicaid status two weeks after her death.

I am wondering if my sister and I (or “the estate of Kathleen Gagne”) are entitled to any of these Medicaid funds, for example to help defray the cost of the cremation, mortuary services, autopsy, and / or any of the other expenses.

Do you know anything about this at all? Or do I need to contract a different type of attorney to help me deal with this type of thing?

I attached to the email a PDF copy of the letter from the Department of Children and Families.

Steve replied to my email at 1:22 PM on September 12th with:

I have no experience dealing with this issue so I don’t know what may be covered.

Looking for an Update

September 7th, 2012 @ 11:46 am

On the morning of September 7th, 2012, I sent this email to Steve Phillips of Pincus & Currier, LLP, the attorney who was working with us at the time:

Hey Steve,

Can you tell me what’s happening right now?

Have you heard anything from Dr. Wolf?

Did you send the notice to Woodland Terrace about not destroying any of my mother’s charts or records?

Did you discover what their insurance policy is?

Were you able to acquire copies of my mother’s medical records for Dr. Wolf? (Has she requested them from you?)

There should be quite an extensive file on my mother at Halifax Hospital; she was there four times since December 2011 for a total of almost 150 days.

There should also be some sort of file on her at Fish Memorial Hospital in Deland.

You can see a detailed list of where she was and when by visiting the “Places” page at http://kathiegagne.com/places/

I also wanted to make sure you knew that yesterday, September 6, 2012, I received an email from Dr. Allen Cusack of Cusack Mortuary at about 11 AM (your time) in which he said:

“I also spoke with Dr. Wolf and gave her the copy of what Dr. Peele said in order for her to complete her studies. To be honest, it was a good idea to have the autopsy done. His findings were probable causes, so in other words, he was not sure.”

In two weeks my mom would have turned 64.

Thanks,

David Vincent Gagne

Note: Steve never responded directly to this email. I did not hear from him again until September 12th, when he replied to a different email.