One of the worst things I can ever imagine happening is my partner of 15 years suffer some kind of serious health problems; I love him so much that it would pain me beyond belief to see him suffering any kind of physical pain. The only thing worse I can imagine is beeing prevented from visiting him in the hospital. That's exactly what happened two years ago to Janice Langbehn when her partner of 18 years, Lisa Ponds, collapsed with an aneurysm during a Florida vacation and was taken to a Miami trauma center. For more than eight hours, Langbehn and the couple's three children where denied visitation with the slowly dying Ponds, despite Langbehn's repeated pleadings. The harrowing story is detailed in today's New York Times, and it is now the subject of a lawsuit against the hospital, Jackson Memorial in Miami. I hope the hospital loses its shorts.
Langbehn's ordeal began in February 2007, when she, Ponds and their three children — then ages 9, 11 and 13 — traveled to Miami for a cruise. After boarding the ship, Ponds collapsed while taking pictures of the children playing basketball, and she was rushed to the Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial. Langbehn and the children arrived at the hospital around 3:30 p.m. Things quickly turned into a living hell.
Ms. Langbehn says that a hospital social worker informed her that she was in an "antigay city and state" and that she would need a health care proxy to get information. (The worker denies having made the statement, Mr. Alonso said.) As the social worker turned to leave, Ms. Langbehn stopped him. "I said: ‘Wait a minute. I have those health care proxies,’ " she said. She called a friend to fax the papers.
Many years ago my partner and I hired a lawyer to put together health care directives and living wills for each of us, in which we specify that the other person has sole responsibility to make health care decisions for us if we are not able to. We developed these documents at the same time that we created recovable living trusts to ensure that we each receive whatever is owned by the other upon either of our deaths, since that wouldn't happen otherwise. We've done everything we can do to demonstrate that we are a loving, caring, committed couple. Imagine my dismay to learn that Langbehn's health care directive didn't mean a hill of beans to the workers at Jackson Memorial.
The medical chart shows that the (health care directive) documents arrived around 4:15 p.m., but nobody immediately spoke to Ms. Langbehn about Ms. Ponds’s condition. During her eight-hour stay in the trauma unit waiting room, Ms. Langbehn says, she had two brief encounters with doctors. Around 5:20 a doctor sought her consent for a "brain monitor" but offered no update about the patient’s condition. Around 6:20, two doctors told her there was no hope for a recovery.
Langbehn also pleaded repeatedly to hospital officials to allow their children to see their mother, even showing hospital workers the children's birth certificates, but to no avail.
"I said to the receptionist, ‘Look, they’re her kids,’" Ms. Langbehn said.
The hospital tries to explain its inexcusable actions by trying to say that a visit to Ponds by her partner and children would "interfere with other emergency care."
"The primary legal point is that the amount of visitation allowed in a trauma emergency room should be decided by the surgeons and nurses treating the patients," he said.
But Jackson Memorial's argument seems particularly hollow given the fact that when Ponds' sister arrived at the hospital eight hours later, at 11:30 p.m., hospital workers immediately told her that Ponds had been moved an hour earlier to the intensive care unit and provided her with Ponds' room number.
At midnight the children were finally able to visit their unconscious mother. Ponds was declared brain-dead at 10:45 that morning.
Despite repeated requests to see her partner, Ms. Langbehn says she was given just one five-minute visit, when a priest administered last rites.
For any straight folks out there who are married, I ask you to imagine a hospital treating you the same, preventing you from visiting your dying spouse. Or children being denied the chance to visit their dying parent. And as the Times notes, this isn't just a gay issue.
..lawyers say the case could affect the way hospitals treat all patients with nonmarital relationships, including older people who choose not to marry, unmarried heterosexual couples and single people who rely on the support of close friends rather than relatives.
I cannot begin to imagine the hell that Langbehn and her children went through as hospital workers repeatedly denied their requests to visit their partner and mother. As I said from the start, it's one of the worst things I can ever imagine happening.
"I have this deep sense of failure for not being at Lisa’s bedside when she died," Ms. Langbehn said. "How I get over that I don’t know, or if I ever do."
I have nothing more to add, other than to say that this crap has got to stop.