A hospital’s services are meant to help and treat their patients, but its staff is still made up of people, imperfect people who can make mistakes. Of course, mistakes made in the medical field can have serious consequences, but these problems compound when the doctors and nurses involved try to hide what they did wrong. That’s precisely what one hospital in Delaware did after its staff physically forced one of its patients to stay by denying him the right to get discharged by handcuffing him to his bed.
According to the patient’s girlfriend on r/legaladvice, the story began when he went to the ER because of excruciating pain in his neck and shoulders. Tests were done, and nothing seemed too out of the ordinary, until doctors began giving him an excessive amount of opioids and painkillers. The issue here is that the Delaware patient suffers from a liver condition and even had a transplant done, which the medical staff knew. Yet, they gave him too many opioids anyway, causing some very serious health issues.
The patient realizes this and wants to leave, but the staff force him to stay to do more testing. However, the “hospital says he is not mentally competent enough to discharge himself,” his girlfriend explains. Even though her boyfriend had acted completely calm and normal, the doctors and nurses took drastic measures, handcuffing him to his bed to force him to stay against his will. The girlfriend and the man’s family soon discovered that the reason they did this was to avoid any evidence of their mistake by giving him too much medication, despite his liver condition.
“They messed up. They overloaded him with opioids, thought they [expletive] up his liver, and tried to cover their [expletive] when they realized what they did. The other details of this case make it even worse.”
Fortunately, the Delaware patient was eventually discharged after all the pain died down and the doctors had completed their extensive so-called “testing.” But the evidence was in the medical documents: the man had always been mentally competent and should have had the right to be discharged. Yet the malicious hospital staff wanted to cover up their mistake and handcuffed him, essentially holding him hostage so their mishandling of the treatment wouldn’t get out.
Luckily, the girlfriend claims lawyers and the man’s family are supportive of pursuing a lawsuit, and rightfully so. No hospital should make a mistake and then get away with covering up what it did.
