A 25-year-old Milwaukee daycare worker with an enlarged heart went to a local emergency room reporting chest pains and shortness of breath, but instead of being seen by a doctor immediately, she was made to wait for so long she ended up dying before being treated, according to a Milwaukee County medical examiner’s report emailed to Daily Kos Tuesday. Tashonna Ward, a black woman, was with her sister when she first checked in at Froedtert Hospital just before 5 PM on Jan. 2 in Wauwatosa, which is about seven miles west of Milwaukee. Ward ended up waiting more than two hours in the facility’s emergency room waiting area before deciding to walk out, according to the report. Her death, which was reported on Facebook by a local activist, has raised multiple questions regarding whether Ward would have been treated differently if she were a white woman.
"This is what people are talking about when they say our health care system is racist," Chet Agni, a researcher, tweeted Sunday. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump tweeted Tuesday: "Studies show black patients wait for an average of 69 minutes in emergency rooms, while white patients wait 53 minutes." Ward’s wait time practically doubled both of those averages. She left the hospital just before 7:30 PM after being told she could potentially have to wait six hours to see a doctor, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. “Idk what they can do about the emergency system at freodert (sic) but they damn sure need to do something,” Ward reportedly said on Facebook. “I been here since 4:30 something for shortness of breath, and chest pains for them to just say it’s a two to SIX hour wait to see a dr.”
She instead asked her sister to come get her and take her to an urgent care clinic in the area, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. They stopped to get Tashonna Ward’s insurance card from her mother’s house then headed to the clinic, the newspaper reported. But Tashonna Ward never made it inside the clinic. She collapsed next to her vehicle outside of the urgent care facility and was being transported back to the hospital by the time a Froedtert staff member called her at 8:39 PM “to check on her,” according to the medical examiner's report. Ward was unresponsive by the time the ambulance got her back to the emergency room at 9:07 PM, and she was pronounced dead less than 20 minutes later.
In her time at the hospital, multiple tests were performed on the dying woman, including an electrocardiogram, which was normal, and a chest x-ray, which showed Ward had cardiomegaly, or an enlarged heart, the medical examiner’s office reported. Yolanda Ward, Tashonna’s mother, told the medical examiner her child learned she had the condition during a previous pregnancy.
Andrea Ward, the victim's cousin, said on a GoFundMe page to support the family in paying for funeral costs that her cousin's "symptoms progressed so quickly" that she "was not able to be revived." She later asked the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "How can you triage someone with shortness of breath and chest pain, and stick them in the lobby? Froedtert needs to change their policy."
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