Virginia L. Robinson

My name is Reginald Robinson. My mother, Virginia L. Robinson, was admitted to the hospital on 5/30/13. At the time, my mother, who was 89, could remember anything, take her medicines, remember her doctors’ appointments, and everything. A few weeks before, suddenly, she forgot how to take her medicine could not remember telephone numbers, and she would constantly fall asleep, always leaning toward the right. She seemed confused and slurred her speech. The first thought was that she had a stroke.

We went to the hospital emergency room and found out that she was a “retainer.” She inhaled oxygen, but exhaled very little CO2. Well, that following Tuesday, my mother would not respond to anyone in the room. The result was a move to ICU and she was put on the ventilator. She did well and there was some improvement, but 2 weeks into her 4-week stay, her kidneys stopped working. Then her blood pressure started to drop and her midsection began to swell enormously, along with her right arm that had began to swell the night of admission, from an IV insertion that had to be put in the left arm due to her complaining of it burning in the right.

In the ICU, her left arm soon swelled up and both began to show small blisters. The day of my mother’s death, she was being cleaned and in the process of turning her over, the nurses and I discovered her laying in a pool of blood. I had noticed days before that she was always uncomfortable, in pain, grimacing at the slightest touch. And these reddish spots on her neck, which as I tell you now, no one knew what they were. They would say it’s her medication. My mother died that night and weeks later, I received her death certificate. You see we, myself and my girlfriend of 25 years, also my mother’s co-caregiver along with myself, were with her as she took her last breath and left her failing body. We thought she had died of heart failure, kidney failure, or pulmonary hypertension. It was not. She died of pneumonia and sepsis. (Sepsis and Pneumonia) It has been 3 months and I still cannot process how can she get sepsis in a place that is suppose to be so clean? How could people who spent years in medical school miss this HOW!

Source: by Reginald Robinson (Virginia's son)