This sounds like a nightmare, but it really happened. In summer 2021, David Wellsa 69-year-old man, arrived at PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center in Vancouver, Washington, after an accident in which He choked on a piece of meat and fell unconscious..
What happened next is something that even in the worst horror movie you couldn’t imagine.
It turns out that, due to an identification errorWells was mistaken for his roommate, Michael Beehler. The hospital contacted Beehler’s sister, Debbie Danielson, and asked if she wanted to turn off life support for who she believed was her brother, since he was supposedly with “brain death”.
Without thinking too much, Debbie made the difficult decision to authorize the disconnectionbelieving he was ending his brother’s life.
Debbie then organized the funeral, wrote the obituary and mourned the loss of what she thought was her loved one. But on August 14, an unexpected call shocked her. His brother Michael was alive.
He receives a call from his “dead brother”
“I told him, ‘You can’t be alive. You’re dead!’”Debbie remembered, completely surprised.
From there, everything was chaos. The medical examiner confirmed that the body presumed dead was not Beehler’s, but Wells’.
But that’s not all, since the worst of all is that Wells’s son, Shawn, did not find out about the mix-up until 2023, when the story was revealed in the media.
“I have no words to describe how poorly they handled this. “I can never take that decision back,” Shawn said, devastated.
And even though his father David Wells they had detected him brain deaththe family was not consulted to disconnect him, although the hospital thought so, but the call was made to the family of Michael Beehler.
The incident was so serious that the Washington Department of Health investigated what happened. The hospital had not implemented a proper process to verify patient identities, resulting in this fatal error.
Affected family sues
Although no sanctions were imposed, the hospital said it took steps to improve its identification procedures.
But the Wells family, along with Beehler and Danielsondecided to sue the hospital and other entities involved, including ambulance and funeral homedue to negligence and emotional distress. They are seeking justice for the terrible mess that changed their lives forever.
For its part, the PeaceHealth hospital issued a statement in which it defended its care and explained that everything happened during the difficult days of the COVID-19 pandemicwhen hospitals were under enormous pressure. Despite this, the affected family cannot help but feel that such a serious mistake should never have happened.
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