The Truth Comes Out, St. Rita’s Nursing Home Tragedy
What passes for high ground in Louisiana’s southeastern marshlands are the patches of terra firma that did not flood during Hurricane Betsy in 1965.
St. Rita’s Nursing Home was built 20 years ago on one of those patches. That figured prominently in the decision by Sal and Mabel Mangano, St. Rita’s owners, to ride out Hurricane Katrina in their one-story brick building rather than follow an order by St. Bernard Parish to evacuate the home’s 60 residents. The Manganos even invited their relatives, staffers and the staff’s relatives to use St. Rita’s as a shelter, and nearly 30 people accepted the offer.
For a few moments after Hurricane Katrina barreled through on the morning of Aug. 29, it seemed the Manganos had made the right decision: The parking lot was dry, the roof intact. Then disaster struck. When Sal Mangano and several other men stepped outside to inspect the grounds, they heard a low rumbling sound. A wall of water appeared, rolling toward them. The men raced back inside and fortified the doors and windows. The water hit the building, rose up the sides and then burst inside.
“We were like in a sinking ship,” says Gene Alonzo, a retired fisherman who stayed at St. Rita’s to be with his disabled brother, Carlos, a resident. “I never did see water come up like that.”
Within 20 minutes, the water inside rose almost to the ceiling and nearly three dozen residents were drowning, some in their beds, in one of the signature scenes of horror wrought by Katrina.
Alonzo’s account of the ordeal, together with new details from government officials, survivors and the Manganos’ attorney, James Cobb, paint the most complete picture so far of what happened at St. Rita’s before and after Katrina struck — and shed light on why the Manganos did not evacuate.
Their descriptions also debunk some of the myths that grew out of the chaotic aftermath of the hurricane, including reports that the Manganos abandoned their nursing home during rescue efforts there.
The revelations come at a time when it’s also becoming clear that loopholes in state evacuation laws could make prosecuting the Manganos more complicated than it appeared on Sept. 13, when they were charged with 34 counts of negligent homicide.
Thirteen weeks after Katrina, the Manganos are the only ones to be criminally charged in Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti’s probe of more than 200 Katrina-related deaths at four New Orleans-area hospitals and 13 nursing homes.
Among the details to emerge since St. Rita’s flooded:
There were 35 victims at the scene, not 34. On Sept. 30, a woman’s body, with a feeding tube attached, was found outside the home of the Manganos’ son, Sal, which is behind St. Rita’s. St. Bernard Parish coroner Bryan Bertucci says he has not yet identified her.
Kris Wartelle, Foti’s spokeswoman, says Foti has not decided whether to add a 35th count to the Manganos’ charges. Each count carries a maximum prison sentence of five years.
Five of the 25 residents who were rescued died shortly afterward. It’s unclear how the trauma of the rescue affected the health of those residents, but Wartelle says the five deaths have been added to Foti’s ongoing probe of St. Rita’s.
Jodi Hanson, one of nearly 60 relatives of St. Rita’s residents who sought to locate the survivors by trading information through a private Internet chat room, says three men and two women died by Oct. 3. She declined to identify them, citing privacy concerns.
Contrary to widespread reports in the media, the Manganos did not abandon St. Rita’s during the flooding.
Nor did they seal the fate of their elderly residents by strapping them to their beds before leaving, as was widely reported. They worked alongside their staff and a few Good Samaritans during the frantic rescue effort, according to Cobb, Alonzo and other witnesses. Bertucci says none of the bodies recovered from St. Rita’s was strapped to a bed or a wheelchair.
The Manganos are living in Louisiana, but Cobb declines to say where. “I’m concerned for their safety,” he says. “These are very emotional issues still.”
The criminal case against the Manganos concerns whether their decision not to evacuate St. Rita’s in the face of a monster storm amounted to willful negligence.
Forecasters had predicted a 21-foot storm surge in St. Bernard Parish that would last more than six hours. The parish council ordered a mandatory evacuation on Aug. 28, the day before Katrina hit, and St. Rita’s was the only one of the five nursing homes in the parish that did not comply —— facts that would seem to help prosecutors in the Manganos’ case.
The case has not been scheduled for trial because the parish court system, which was flooded by Katrina, is only partially operating and not yet able to handle a complex trial, Wartelle says.
Victims’ relatives feel betrayed
When the case is tried, Cobb says, the Manganos’ defense will aim to exploit loopholes in Louisiana law regarding nursing homes and evacuations.
State law requires licensed nursing homes to file evacuation plans with the local government. But the law does not require the plans to be followed during an emergency, and it does not require nursing home operators to follow mandatory evacuation orders.
“The law is silent on those two issues,” says Bob Johannessen, spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, a fact that would appear to help the Manganos’ defense.
Likewise, Louisiana’s requirement that nursing homes have an evacuation plan does not require an actual evacuation. The law allows nursing homes to “evacuate” to “a safe place” within the home.
St. Rita’s evacuation plan called for residents to be taken to Baton Rouge or Lafayette in two stages, with the most infirm residents to go 48 to 72 hours before a hurricane, and the rest to go 24 to 48 hours before a storm. Despite several conversations before the hurricane with Bertucci, other parish officials and relatives of residents about evacuating, the Manganos did not follow their written plan.
Some family members of St. Rita’s victims regard that decision as a betrayal of trust.
Anna Cousins, whose mother-in-law, Adele Cousins, 81, died at St. Rita’s, is involved in one of three wrongful-death lawsuits that victims’ families have filed against the Manganos.
The Cousins family’s lawsuit says the Manganos and St. Rita’s staff members “led the family to believe” that Adele would be evacuated in such situations. Cousins says family members would have moved Adele out of the storm’s path themselves if they had known about the Manganos’ decision earlier.
Cousins says that by the time the Manganos informed her they intended to stay, she was complying with St. Bernard’s mandatory evacuation order and was stuck in traffic on Interstate 10, headed west to Houston. “You don’t take the lives of people and make that decision, and not even tell us, ‘We’re not going anywhere, come pick up your parents,’ ” Cousins says. “They didn’t give us the opportunity. I can’t get past that.”
Steve Gallodoro, a St. Bernard fire official whose 82-year-old partially paralyzed father, Tufanio, drowned in his bed, says that most people in the parish who did not evacuate “did so by choice. The people at St. Rita’s had no choice.”
He says the Manganos assured him three days before Katrina that they planned to evacuate to Baton Rouge or Lafayette. “I was comfortable with that,” he says. “My father had special needs. We would not have been able to transport him. I told my sister that he would be in better hands with them.”
Cobb, the Manganos’ attorney, says an evacuation would have killed several frail residents. At the time, the Manganos thought that staying in place and saving those lives was the better option, he says.
Relatives of the drowned residents see no wrenching dilemma.
“Do you risk two or three lives for 60 lives?” asks Bernard Reyes, Anna Cousins’ brother-in-law.
Bertucci says he phoned St. Rita’s about 2 p.m. on Aug. 28 and offered the Manganos buses. “I told them I had two buses and two drivers to take them anywhere,” he says. “We were very alarmed by the size and intensity of the storm.”
Mabel Mangano turned down the offer. “She asked me, ‘Do you think they’ll be mad?’ ” Bertucci says. He says he assumed she was referring to the parish council.
Mabel Mangano does not remember the conversation that way, Cobb says. The lawyer says the offer of buses “never happened.”
To win a conviction, Cobb says, prosecutors must prove that the Manganos willfully and wantonly put St. Rita’s residents at risk.
“How does someone act willfully with disregard for the safety of others when you put yourself, your grandchildren, nieces and nephews in the same exact spot?” he asks.
‘Like Niagara Falls’
Scientists are still analyzing why St. Bernard flooded so severely. The best guess is that the parish was hit with a storm surge from Lake Borgne, which is open to the Gulf of Mexico, and the breaching of three of the four levees that protect the parish from the sea.
Alonzo recalls the floodwaters flowing from the direction of the lake, a few miles north of St. Rita’s.
Trishka Stevens, Jodi Hanson’s grandmother, says that when the water burst into the building, it cascaded through air-conditioning vents “like Niagara Falls.” Stevens, 75, who has not walked in five years, was in her bed in Room 407 as water rose around her.
“It was up to my chin,” she says.
In the pandemonium that followed, nurses and aides waded and then swam through the halls, unhooking the straps that held the wheelchair-bound upright and pushing them onto mattresses. They then shoved the mattresses outside so the evacuees could be taken to higher ground by boat.
Alonzo, 55, says he put his 52-year-old brother onto a mattress, then grabbed Carlos’ roommate, Harold Kurz. Alonzo recounts the frantic effort by nurses and others to save as many as possible:
“You can’t get out a door, so they’re kicking out windows to float the residents out on mattresses to put them on the roof. In every room, people were hollering. They were screaming like somebody was murdering them (and) … for God to help them. It was a horror scene.”
Stevens was saved by Steve Snyder, 29, an offshore oil rig worker who had motored past St. Rita’s in a boat while fleeing his own flooded house nearby. By then, Snyder says, rescuers at St. Rita’s were chopping holes in the roof to pull out residents who were floating just below the ceiling.
Snyder says he and his brother-in-law swam from room to room, searching for survivors. They gave up, he says, when “we just didn’t hear no more screaming, no more people calling for help.”
Trauma after the rescue
For the survivors, the trauma continued. They were moved by boat to a school, then to a shelter at St. Bernard High School and then to a staging area in Algiers, 15 miles up the Mississippi River.
Stevens ended up at the New Orleans airport and was flown to Houston, where she was hospitalized with chest pains. Doctors initially thought she’d had a heart attack, but later found that she had seven broken ribs from being dropped as rescuers at St. Rita’s had pushed her onto a boat. She was moved twice more, landing finally at a nursing home in Ocala, Fla., near her daughter’s home.
The relatives of St. Rita’s residents found each other on a New Orleans website and set up a private chat room to trade information. They have located St. Rita’s survivors across the South.
To help survivors, Jodi Hanson set up a charity called St. Rita’s Angels. “Winter is coming. They don’t have sweaters or coats. Nursing homes don’t provide those,” she says
Alonzo returned to St. Rita’s a month after Katrina to get belongings from his ruined car. He calls the place haunted, and says he will never go back.
“Can you imagine being in your wheelchair … and that water came up over your head? I guess that’s why people are so mad.”
He tears up, and then says quietly he wasn’t strong enough to hold onto both his brother and Kurz. “You can’t swim with two people. I had to let Harold go. I still think about that when I fall asleep.”
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My aunt died in St. Rita’s Nursing Home Tragedy and I want to talk to anyone that was there or anyone that had a family member in there. This is my address po box 429 warren ma 01083
i think the owners of st ritas nursing home should be placed in a tank and let it slowly fill with water while they cant get out of their w/c and let them drown the same as their residents. i am a nurse and i work in a nursing home west of st bernard parish. but better let god will deal with them on judgement day. my prayers are with you and yall’s familys. it has been a yr and it still seems like yesterday.
god be with you all
sincerely, tammy
My heart goes out to all the families of the survivors and those who were lost in St. Rita’s during Hurricane Katrina. I was on the NOLA boards trying to find family and friends from Buras and other parts of Plaquemines Parish when I learned of St. Rita’s Nursing Home. It was beyond horror. All I could think of while I listened to frightened families was, ‘what if that was my grandfather in that nursing home or my mother or cousin…” I have a cousin who is wheel-chair bound from juvenile RA. He lived in New Orleans and while it took us some 6-months to find him, we did and he was safe, thank goodness – as were many friends and family although I did lose several classmates along with several of their family members whom I thought so much of when I was a resident of the parish.
The horror of St. Rita’s should never have happened. I am like others over this issue. I believe the owners should pay for the crime of allowing people under their care to die such a horrible death. Sure, the powers that be will deal with them in time. Karmic justice always gets its way in the end but they should also suffer man’s law too. They are guilty of allowing all those people whom family had entrusted into their care to drown not to mention the survivors to have health and mental issues for the remainder of their short lives as well as leaving all family members with this torment for the rest of their lives. It’s simply too large of a crime to allow them to get away with. I also hope the fact their license was expired comes into play as well.
Families of St. Rita, you are in my thoughts and my prayers. It is my hope that justice for your loved ones be found in the criminal case as well as a civil case if the chance becomes available.
Hurricanes are definitely something that everyone in Louisiana is use to dealing with. I have been through many hurricanes in Louisiana and in Florida.
During each one, I have, “rode out the storm”. Over time, as each hurricane comes and goes, you begin to become confident in your home, that you do not have to evacuate. This was the general feeling of many people that experienced hurricanes in the past. This was also the same consensus of many people that lived on Pensacola Beach during Hurricane Ivan. As we know, this particular hurricane devastated the Florida Panhandle. Despite the warnings and the mandatory evacuation order (which this particular scenario lacked and I can’t see why), people still remained behind. They were stubborn and chose to risk their own lives. Many were lucky to survive.
As this is not a story about Hurricane Ivan, but that of Katrina, I will get to the point. People of the area instilled a certain trust and confidence in their ability to ride out the storm. Many residents and business owners alike had faith in those controls that were built to protect them. Unfortunately, those controls failed causing this horrific tragedy.
In fact, all the victims were safe during the hurricane. It wasn’t until the failure of the levy system that caused this mass loss of life.
The decisions made by the government not to issue a mandatory evacuation order would allow you to have a false sense of security. This is why the facility was not evacuated. If the order would have came, this tragedy would have been avoided. Not to sound one sided or partial, the owners still bear responsibility for their failure to ensure personal safety.
So, with this, you can not place all the blame for this tragedy on the owners. It was caused by a series of bad decisions that first started with the lack of an evacuation order coupled with underestimating the full potential of the storm. A whole series of bad decisions has led to this horrible conclusion.
For all the family’s that lost loved ones, I could never feel the grief that you are suffering still at this moment. Despite your immense sorrow, I encourage you to have faith. Have faith in knowing that your loved ones suffer no more. As hard as it may seem, the first step to healing your wounds comes with forgiveness. I encourage you to forgive those that you despise and to blame no more. Through this, only good can come.
Barry: Your story sounds sweet & tender; however, it is missing one vital fact. It was common knowledge that Hurricane Katrina – much like Hurricane Fran and Hurricane Floyd here in the Carolinas was going to hit as far inland as New Orleans. This within itself would cause a rational person to realize the fatal flaw in thinking and acting on behalf of the owners of St. Rita’s. The healing cannot begin because these people are responsible for the deaths and further pain caused to the sufferers entrusted into their care. There were 4 other nursing homes in St. Bernard’s Parish. ALL of the other 4 nursing homes evacuated! Why did the owners of St. Rita’s Nursing Home believe they were so much better? They didn’t. They stayed because it was cheaper to stay than to move patients entrusted into their care; they lied to family members by claiming they were moving their patients; furthermore, they NEVER HAD an evacuation plan on file as ordered by the state nor did they have a valid license as they had not renewed the license to continue to function as a nursing home. Those last facts should have at least left them with SOME responsibility!
I find it ironic that none of the owners’ families died in the waters of Katrina.
If this sounds hard-hearted then so be it. I’ve witnessed the short-cuts taken by nursing care and rest home facilities for years and it disgusts me how they charge exorbitant amounts of money in addition to taking the patient’s social security checks every month while cutting staff members so short that it leaves every patient within the facility in jeopardy. The reason they can get by with all these infractions among many many others is because there are far too few inspectors to go out to check these facilities in addition to the fact that most of these facilities have prior notice of the inspectors’ visits, which should be illegal.
It is high time that we stop treating the elderly as if they were cattle to put out to pasture. These people are the backbone of this country. They worked a lifetime to support their families, raise children to become vital members of society, and paid taxes to keep this country going not to mention the thousands upon thousands of military personnel who are living in nursing homes and/or rest homes today. Their treatment is equally as horrifying considering what they gave up to keep this country free.
I believe it is time for EVERY state in the USA to change it’s policies when it comes to the running of nursing care and rest home facilities. My daughter works for a respite care center as did my MIL before she retired for good in her early 70s due to health reasons. Unless you have been in these facilities a considerable amount of time you have NO IDEA what happens on the inside when family is not present. After my birth paternal grandfather had to go live in a nursing home I took it upon myself to check out various homes and made the decision under threat of legal action against my birth father’s siblings to have this wonderful man placed in the best facility I found. To ensure his care was adequate and above the call of duty over the 10+ years before his death in his late 80s to early 90s, I stopped in to visit him during my lunch hour at work, before work when I had time, and after work on days when my oldest daughter did not have tutoring or dance classes. In addition, I would take an hour or so off from work at a time different from my lunch hour to pop in unannounced. I also invoked my right as stipulated in the agreement signed upon his moving there to pop in during evening hours and even the middle of the night.
I must say the people who cared for him were wonderful. He was cared for well in the last years of his life at ALL TIMES OF THE DAY AND THE NIGHT AS WELL AS ALL TIMES IN BETWEEN.
When he became ill had had to be hospitalized due to geriatric diabetes, the nurses, staff members from the offices, and even the candy stripers (interns & volunteers) sent him cards, fruit & diabetic goodies once approved by his doctor. They welcomed him back afterward with open arms. Each of his caretakers were there with the family (mostly for my sake since my younger brother and I were the only two out of many many grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren, and great-great-great-grandchildren not to mention his living 6 children, one of which was my birth father who did not bother showing up at his father’s funeral!
I wish ALL nursing care and rest homes were built and run according to the manner of this one. If it was, it would be such a pleasurable place to spend the years when a loved one becomes too sick to care for him or herself.
Your points are very valid. Being a man of the military myself and one use to making tough decisions, I would not have haplessly put other peoples lives in danger knowing the coming storm. For that, they are guilty. Their decision to stay did cause the deaths of those people for whatever reason they decided to stay. No one can ever change this.
I do feel that a closer look should be taken on the parish’s decision not to order a mandatory evacuation. It seems that this has never come up, or it was simply ignored. They are every part of this horrific situation as the owners of St. Rita’s are. It just baffles me to sit and listen to the excuses the parish officials had for not issuing the order. One mentioned that fact of it affecting businesses. Well, I would like to know who in the world needs to continue to run a business with the approach of a catastrophic hurricane? I would think their business would be the last thing on their mind.
You are absolutely correct about nursing homes needing more attention. Just to hear about some of the horrors that occur within some of these homes makes me very upset. More stringent controls and federal regulation is a necessity for these places. I would love to see a requirement for third party 24 hour surveillance.
I really appreciate the insight from your reply. Unfortunately, there is nothing more that can be done for this particular case.
Sincerely,
Barry
Barry: Thank you so much for the gentle response. I have had some truly horrible responses over this case since Katrina leveled the place I used to call home. I lived in Plaquemines Parish during my teenage years. In fact, the area where Katrina hit land sits just south of a town called Buras at an old Civil War fort called Fort Jackson. It is where the parish holds the annual Orange Festival. I lived on a houseboat with my birth mother, my younger brother, a cousin, and the man my mother was with at the time. The reason we left for Louisiana was because we had family there and mother’s previous visits brought about friendships and a man into her life so she finally left my birth father who was a physically, emotionally, and verbally abusive alcoholic. Mother was not blameless in that fiasco that was my childhood. She was an enabler. She seemed to care more about herself than protecting her children. I became my brother’s surrogate mother over the years. After leaving home and becoming emancipated by a bad marriage then left to raise an infant on my own after it fell apart, I later had my baby brother on my doorstep to raise as well without any support of any kind from either of my parents or the birth father of my child. Years later I did meet and eventually trust enough to break the ice from around my heart so another man could come into my life; however, it took him about 5 years or so to convince me I could trust him enough to marry again. That was some 20 years ago.
The man I know as dad was my mother’s 2nd and 4th husband. She also married my birth father twice and is on marriage #5 now. I simply cannot understand why she kept tossing the men who would have loved her and taken care of her in addition to treating her as an equal in everything away. Dad was one of those men. He is a former (although in the Marines there is no former anything; once a marine always a marine LOL!) Gunnery Sgt in the Marines then later after his military career he became a police detective in Albany, Georgia. Mother married him when I was only an infant but by the time I was about 6-7yrs old she left him to return to her home state when her mother became ill. Of all people to be in my grams’ room repairing a light fixture was my birth father. It wasn’t long after when they married again although there is some question as to the fatherhood of my little brother. He’s not so little at 34 but still, when siblings have more of a parent/child relationship than a sibling relationship it seems to change things drastically.
The one thing I did after hearing of the St. Rita tragedy was begin writing my congressmen about putting into place federal and state regulations that work, not ones that simply make the owners of these fly-by-night and elderly dump companies rich. Not much is happening but I still continue to write with hopes that one day someone will listen.
The county (wow was that difficult to get used to saying upon returning to the Carolinas after having lived in the bayous where counties didn’t exist yet parishes did) I live in has for the most part fairly decent nursing home and rest homes though there are some that need some shaking up. The only problem with these few is that the ownership keeps changing so fast it is difficult to pin an owner down to file complaints with the state.
The previous respite care center where my oldest worked was built in a flood area zone! Earlier this year she made a lateral move to another of the company’s facilities when she began school at a different college that is too far for her to drive to and from the former one for every shift and still make it back to her county before she has to be in class. However, I must say that despite the flood zone building, which was rather stupid and I cannot for the life of me figure out how in the world they were able to gain approval from the commissioners to build in that area, they do have a complete laid out plan to move the patients from the facility to the hospital only a few minutes away. For someone with good eyesight, which I lack due to a degenerative retinal disease, optic nerve problems, and compromised by lupus (SLE) and Sjogren’s disease, one could stand on the high end of the property where the facility resides and actually see the hospital so they are extremely close. They have ambulances, both private and state-sponsored, available to move patients out as well as a few special buses used to transport patients to and from doctor appointments for those fit enough and with enough cognitive skills to leave the facility for their appointments. Each of the shuttle buses have wheelchair lifts as well so that takes care of those in wheelchairs. One of my favorite residents there is an elderly man who served in the military. We sat in the arboretum for a few hours together when my daughter had to do some paperwork on a day I had a doctor visit myself. My husband was picking our youngest up from school that day so it gave me time to get away from home for a while, which is not possible otherwise as there is no public transportation here.
I fear in the near future that I may have to begin to search for a place for Dad. He lives too far for either my husband or I to get to him quickly and about a year or so ago he was diagnosed with glaucoma. He already has a heart condition and underwent a stent placement then after moving back from Georgia to here, he had to undergo surgery to have a stent placed in an area where the wire could not reach during the previous stent placements. He has access to transportation through the state to take him to and from the VA hospital, so that helps. I only wish I was able to get him more assistance financially and somehow get help with his medications. Even though he goes to the VA, his medications are still too costly for him to pay and still cover his bills.
My blindness and dealing with lupus and Sjogren’s disease along with the effects from it not to mention dealing with my own spouse having had 2 heart attacks, a stroke, and a quad bypass earlier this year on top of his juvenile diabetes, which is out of control and has been since his heart problems began is too much for me to handle and take care of Dad too. I wouldn’t be able to take care of my husband if it were not for his mother. I’m thankful every day that she was a nurse for some 40 years. She worked both at the local hospital and at a local nursing home working double shifts nearly ever evening and night for as long as I have known her until she had to undergo the first knee replacement. It was like a windfall of health problems afterward and now she is unable to work anywhere, even at a desk job but to be in her mid-70s – like Dad, neither of them have any business working anywhere. It is time for them to rest. They did their job, paid their taxes, and had Mother left me with Dad, my life would have been much smoother and with less grief and heartache than it was; however, I have to admit that regardless of how bad things got, it made me a stronger person in the long run.
It is my hope that one day the United States will stop putting a price tag on human life. I mean just how high must the “butcher bill” go before the majority of the citizens realize that we are guaranteed by the right of law to life. It should not be a privilege; it should be a right and it is long overdue to make life available for everyone. Preventative care alone would keep people healthy longer, which would allow more to work longer with fewer accidents and/or pre-existing conditions causing disabilities at such young ages.
I attempted to return to work after I dealt with the blindness, which included learning how to do everything all over again including going from point A to point B with a sighted person, a cane, and a guide dog. I had to learn to cook all over again because I wasn’t able to see as I had before. So many things changed. Once I thought my life was back on track I went back to school and worked for about 7 yrs as a medical transcriptionist until I began having problems with the ulnar nerve in my right arm, which led eventually to the discovery of lupus and Sjogren’s disease. It explained how the arthritis I had that hurt all the time no matter what I took was more than arthritis. The reason I was always the first to come down with a cold, virus, or bacterial infection was because my immune system was screwed up from the autoimmune diseases. I had to learn to do only so much and no more or risk being bed-ridden for days, a week, to a month.
It has been a long hard road for me. I’ve learned a great deal about myself and the strength I had that I wasn’t sure existed. It put my marriage to the test numerous times yet somehow we managed to hold on through the storms. And, I can say with absolute certainty that there is nothing more frightening than going through a high-risk pregnancy, a high-risk birth, then raising that little baby with little to no sight remaining and later teaching her the abc’s and 123′s as I did her older sister only I had sight when she came along. I must have did something right along the way though. My oldest is in college working to remain in the medical field and working with her patients while the baby is in middle school now and has made the honor roll every report card since she began receiving letter grades in the 1st grade. Last year not only did she have the highest score in language arts and the second highest in math by less than a tenth of a point, she received the student of excellence award from the governor for her volunteer work, participating in the diabetes and cancer drives, not to mention working as the editor of the school newspaper for two years now and being a reporter for it too. This year she even convinced the principal to start a recycling program at the school!
If our generation cannot fix these wrongs of today, I have high hopes that our children will be smarter and more sympathetic to make sure the laws change as they should. Nobody should have to die because they can’t afford life-saving medication. It’s flat out wrong. Doctors took an oath to do no harm. Failing to treat patients all because of the mighty dollar goes against everything they swore to do when these people became doctors. At least that’s my thoughts on the subject. It also should apply to anyone who owns or works within the walls of a nursing home, rest home, or a hospital.
Warmest regards,
Sam