Woman Lies Dying on Hospital Emergency Room Floor, Janitor Cleans Around Her, Cops Arrest Her, She Dies

May 21st, 2007

Via: Los Angeles Times:

In the emergency room at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, Edith Isabel Rodriguez was seen as a complainer.

“Thanks a lot, officers,” an emergency room nurse told Los Angeles County police who brought in Rodriguez early May 9 after finding her in front of the Willowbrook hospital yelling for help. “This is her third time here.”

The 43-year-old mother of three had been released from the emergency room hours earlier, her third visit in three days for abdominal pain. She’d been given prescription medication and a doctor’s appointment.

Turning to Rodriguez, the nurse said, “You have already been seen, and there is nothing we can do,” according to a report by the county office of public safety, which provides security at the hospital.

Parked in the emergency room lobby in a wheelchair after police left, she fell to the floor. She lay on the linoleum, writhing in pain, for 45 minutes, as staffers worked at their desks and numerous patients looked on.

Aside from one patient who briefly checked on her condition, no one helped her. A janitor cleaned the floor around her as if she were a piece of furniture. A closed-circuit camera captured everyone’s apparent indifference.

Arriving to find Rodriguez on the floor, her boyfriend unsuccessfully tried to enlist help from the medical staff and county police — even a 911 dispatcher, who balked at sending rescuers to a hospital.

Alerted to the “disturbance” in the lobby, police stepped in — by running Rodriguez’s record. They found an outstanding warrant and prepared to take her to jail. She died before she could be put into a squad car.

Posted in Collapse, Health | Top Of Page

13 Responses to “Woman Lies Dying on Hospital Emergency Room Floor, Janitor Cleans Around Her, Cops Arrest Her, She Dies”

  1. Alek Hidell says:

    Public medicine has collapsed in NZ also. Similar things recently happened at the public hospitals in Christchurch (25 year old sent home from the ER and died) and Wellington (43 year old died in hospital of pneumonia as nobody checked the X-rays and blood tests). Poorly funded systems will be understaffed and staffed by burnt out and low quality personnel. The NZ govt’s answer is to lower standards and shorten the length of medical training. It is brilliant, as soon the new NZ trained physicians will be too unqualified to be able to leave for higher paying jobs and better working conditions overseas. (A young NZ GP today has to work more hours to pay the rent than new high school grads in entry level jobs did 30 years ago. That is a big incentive to work hard to become a NZ physician – NOT!) ***However $750,000 was available for the NZ mythical human-to-human bird flu pandemic exercise***

    This is what catabolic collapse looks like. Fools keep asking when the shit will hit the fan. This is like someone in Maine in 1863 asking when the US Civil War is going to start. My neighbourhood fences are now gang tagged, they were spotless a year ago. People didn’t used to tolerate that, now too many people are struggling to make their mega housing bubble mortgage payments and are too tired to care. Just because someone can’t see the collapse in their neighbourhood yet doesn’t mean that it isn’t well underway, they just need to be patient.

  2. Kevin says:

    On the thing coming down, I like Dmitry Orlov’s interpretation of it:

    http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2007/Collapse-Discontents-Orlov1feb07.htm

    “Collapse will not be televised, you will not know that it has happened. You will only know that it has happened to you.”

    It’s totally subjective.

    Everyone has different criteria. For me, Southern California has been in a state of collapse for several years. When I was there, I lived like a stressed out rat in a cage. My dad, though, he thought I was insane for wanting to leave. He sees the gridlock traffic as “progress.”

    By New Zealand standards, Kaitaia is a ghetto. But compared to ghettos that I’ve seen in the U.S., Kaitaia seems like a model city. But compare U.S. ghettos to, say, Tijuana, Mexico… Woh. Sitting here, clear across the planet in the Far North of New Zealand, just thinking of the smell and the filth of Tijuana makes my hair stand on end. Tijuana is no different today than it was twenty years ago, the first time I went there.

    Look at that UK horror show. Lip reading surveillance cameras. Cops screaming shit at people on the street over loudspeakers. But is it down? To me, hell yes. But not to lots of people there. Kiwis flock to London. They love it. Four to a room. Unable to save any money. Oh sure. That thing is in great shape. HA

    So where is the collapse?

    “You will only know that it has happened to you.”

  3. d says:

    Not sure if anyone has seen Fred on Everything, but he’s another expat with a clue… most recent article:

    http://fredoneverything.net/America.shtml

  4. DrFix says:

    Fred is great. The sad thing is that it takes someone who has actually bothered to travel to understand where they’ve been, are now, and where they’re going. Gotta get out of the forest from time to time to see all the trees.

    As a kid I lived in Orange and Anaheim back in the late 60’s and 70’s. It was a completely different world back then. Just as the internet boom was taking off, this was in 96, I visited my old digs
    and was shocked to find they looked like squatter shit holes. It was so sad that I vowed never to go back. Better to remember it as it was.

    Back then, 60’s – 70’s, the family went to Tijuana a couple of times. Jose’ Feliciano and his “Feliz Navidad” played on the car radio as we crossed over the border and the roads turned from smooth pavement to cavernous potholes and dirt as we bounced along looking for somewhere to park. Watching my parents haggle with the vendors over prices…Different day and age, different people, different world.

    I’ve been to South Island and I’m not exaggerating when I say that while driving down the coast in the Autumn sunlight, deep in thought about family and life, that I had tears in my eyes. I’d dreamt that one day I’d scratch and save up enough and escape to either Australia or NZ. It took twenty-five years but there I was.

    On coming back I was presented once again with the “hell that is LAX”. The humiliations were sickening. Had we sunk so low? I realized that whatever I had to do I had split, either for some rural safety here in the States or overseas but it had to happen and my intuitive “survival voice” was telling me to hurry the hell up!

    So you don’t have to be paranoid, though that might help, to get an idea of where things are headed. Best to hope for the best but prepare for the worst.

  5. Cherenkov says:

    Pampered people in the first world wonder how revolutions start. Face it. The capitalists, the cronies, the consumerbots, and most of all Amerika, feel they have won and why shouldn’t they. Such behaviour as mentioned above occurs by the minute: pollution, near slavery, social destruction. And, the sad thing is most people read this sort of thing and tssk tssk and say this terrible, but do nothing.

    The only way to kill the cancer is not be the cancer. Do not buy anything that is not directly related to your living another day. Buy local, buy organic, NEVER buy from MalWart. Get rid of your car. Buy a bike. Walk. Ride the bus for longer trips. Quit your cubicle farm job unless it is directly helping destroy the cancer. Get a real job. Make something from local materials. DO NOT SEND YOUR KIDS TO COLLEGE. This is part of the cancer training program. Do not turn them into little consumerbots. Get rid of your television. If you own a home, try to get off the grid. If you rent, try to get off the grid, or at least use a s little energy as possible. My average electric bill is 20$. My gas bill is 24$. I am working to eliminate them all together, and I rent.

    Make connections. Make friends. Make this a game that is fun. It is not that hard. The first step is to kill your TV. The next step is to find a library where you can use their computers. Once you do, kill your computer. Move in with others like you. Share rides. Share big food. Share gardens. Dumpster dive. Love your world.

    KILL THE CANCER!!!!!

  6. R says:

    Cherenkov – Don’t get me wrong, I agree with alot of what you say, but you’re actually encouraging people to not send their kids to college? You’re encouraging us to propagate more uneducated sheep? I understand that the education system in the States is vastly different from what we have here in Canada (ie – we actually give global perspective as opposed to the perpetual “America is wonderful” crap), but even still. If they’re bright enough to get in to post-secondary, and if they have been brought up well to start with, I would hope to hell that a wacky professor or course would be unable to shake their morals. I know that there is a ton of stuff that can be accomplised without a degree, but if you can get one, and if you can do something truly amazing with it, then it is the purist form of stupidity not to. Ignorance is far from being bliss. Same with wasting opportunity.

  7. mom to five says:

    If this woman had been wealthy, she would have been whisked into the first room and treated like royalty. Resignation is too easy for these people. Each and everyone of them need to be prosecuted for manslaughter.

  8. Bonnie says:

    I am an RN but I am so embarassed by this that I am sick. i worked in the emergency room for years and it seems these nurses are burned out and should change jobs. They must not remember they are there to help and care for patients my heart breaks for this lady and her family. I hope that the nurses and other workers involved in this wrongful death can’t look at themselves in the mirror. These practices give bad names to those of us that still love what we do and care deeply about our patients. Shocked in Ky.

  9. C says:

    One of the many questions that has been raised from this tragic all too familiar experience is..Why did only one person in the waiting room check on the woman? I don’t know about you, but I have been in hospital waiting rooms and experienced people screaming at the top of their lungs, falling on the floor, and demanding help. I, like the many in this case, did nothing. Why? Because I believed in our care staff. I believed they had already checked this person and determined they were okay. I am not a doctor, and I believed the care staff knew better than me, so I just attempted to pretend the person was not there. Once I attempted to assist and comfort, but was cursed at. In the future, I will not ignore. I also will not assume the directives given to me concerning my reason for being in the emergency room are appropriate or correct.

  10. dragonfly183 says:

    I have the recordings of the “two” 911 calls that were made regarding the woman on my website http://www.quietlyintothenight.com . According to the call her husband made she was throwing up blood while in the emergency room. A woman who called first said they needed to get an ambulance there so they could take her to a hospital where someone “would” help her and the dispatcher refused because she was already at a hospital.

    This makes me so angry. It also worries me because I am not rich and my husband and I are both self employed so we don’t have health insurance. I hope the womans family is able to get a good lawyer and does something about this!

  11. celso miqueloto says:

    Itis the pits been poor in La.bad cops,stupid dispachers,trrible nurces,all staked up against
    then.

  12. anon says:

    I am sure that this story has been completely skewed-it is all hearsay. And it has obviosly been distorted by the media-because that is what they do. Her death is unfortunate but maybe if she had lost some weight, got a real job, and took care of herself she wouldn’t have been having so many problems. She is not a complete victim here, her choices took her to that situation in life. I mean there was a warrent out for her arrest and everthing – she wasn’t exactly contributing much to society, just another loafer sapping off the system. RIP

  13. Angie says:

    What type of world are we living in when you are at a hospital,the place where you go when you are ill and you are left lying on the floor in your own blood? That is unreal, in this day and age for someone to die from medical neglect. I hope that poor womans family files a huge lawsuit and wins. This just shows what type of people become “Nurses & Doctors”, people that don’t give a damn about anyone.

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