FIRST DO NO HARM
by Sloan Bashinsky…….
Sitting in the waiting room shortly before my homeless lady Kari’s surgery yesterday morning, at Lower Keys Medical Center on Stock Island, I closed my eyes like I might journey in other realms, and immediately was overwhelmed with huge emotion, love and silent love tears, filling the entire hospital, it felt like to me – how I feel about Kari. Then, she was wheeled out of the surgery prep room on a gurney. I leaned down and kissed her on the mouth a few times, said, “I will really miss you, if you do not come back from the anesthesia, but I will not be mad at you.” She’d had a dream about a month prior, of being in the surgery, and she was in a place so wonderful and peaceful, that she stayed there. When she told me of the dream, I said it sounded a heap better than living on the street, sleeping on the ground at night. She is banned for life from KOTS, the city’s homeless shelter, which is another story altogether.
Three hours after I kissed Kari headed into surgery, the surgeon, Rhoda Smith, M.D., came to the waiting room and told me it had gone well. I looked for any scratches or bites on Doctor Smith’s arms. Seeing none, I concluded it probably had gone well. An hour and a half later, they wheeled Kari out of the recovery room on a gurney. She made a few weak cat sounds, and I followed them to the private hospital room assigned to her. She looked like one really wrung out pussy cat. I rubbed her feet some, and she purred a bit. We visited about an hour and a half, then I left to take care of some other things, including writing this article.
When we talked on the telephone later, she told me not to come back up there last night, it was too far a bicycle ride into the wind, and she was doped up, for pain, and would be half out of it, or asleep. Come back tomorrow, she said.
Some backstory…
Kari’s surgery was to repair a fistula (hole) in her colon, which was leaking into her female plumbing. The fistula was created in two stages. After surgery many years prior, to remove some of her female plumbing, her colon rested on top of the surgical wound and became attached to it as the wound healed. Then, when Kari was in the county jail some years later, she slipped climbing down from her top bunk and fell and did the splits on the way down and that ripped her colon from her female plumbing and created the fistula.
Kari’s understanding is …
Thanks to the good work of Jerome Covington, M.D., Internal Medicine, who operates the indigent medical clinic in the dePoo Building on Kennedy Drive in Key West, Dr. Covington, Dr. Smith, the anesthesiologist and the hospital will receive some kind of government reimbursement for treating Kari, who was not able to afford Obama Carel. I suppose Bernie Sanders would like to hear of that, but I wonder how it would go down with President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, etc.?
Well, a bit more backstory, as Kari reported it to me…
When she went into the jail last spring for violating her probation by drinking alcohol, she did what she told me she was going to do in there, based on her previous stint in the jail. She broke out with awful intestinal distress, and with bumps, rash and itching all over her body. She told the jail infirmary’s medical doctor, Rose Chan, M.D., and various infirmary nurses, that the high soy protein diet was causing her intestinal distress, and perhaps her skin break out, and she was pretty sure she also had scabies. Dr. Chan refused to treat Kari for scabies. I appealed to Sheriff Rick Ramsay personally about the soy diet and scabies, and that went nowhere. While Kari was in the jail, she knew of women inmates with severe itching problems, and the women inmates were hearing there was widespread severe itching in the men’s part of the jail.
After Kari was released from the jail mid-December 2015, on probation, she went to see Dr. Covington at the indigent medical clinic in the de Poo Building, on Kennedy Drive. I was present. Dr. Covington’s nurse looked at Kari’s legs and hands, and told her she had scabies, and she could not stay in their office. Dr. Covington then joined them out in the hallway, with me present.
Dr. Covington and his nurse told Kari the scabies needed to be treated, before there could be any surgery for her colon fistula. It was too risky for other people, to do the surgery, if she had scabies. Dr. Covington prescribed a cream, 5 percent of which was the insecticide permethrin. By then, Kari was at suicide-level itching. Her feet were all crusted over, looked like the feet of a horror movie creature. Permethrin is what Mosquito Control puts in its aerial spray to kill adult mosquitoes.
Kari applied the permethrin cream all over herself. A week later, she applied all over herself, below the neck, a veterinary-grade permethrin solution, twice as strong as what Dr. Covington had prescribed for her, which I had diluted with water and put into a plastic spray bottle. I had obtained the veterinary-grade permethrin online, about 5-times more of it at about 1/6th the $75 cost of the drug store permethrin cream. Thereafter, every few days, Kari sprayed her feet and lower legs with the permethrin concoction I had made. I sprayed myself all over with it, from the neck down, as a preventative. It burned like holy hell, especially my tender parts.
Also, Kari soaked her feet once in a gallon bucket of tap water and a lot of bleach for half an hour. She also often applied apple cider vinegar to her feet. All just in case it also was a fungus infection.
The scabies infection went away, Kari’s feet looked like ordinary human feet again. Dr. Covington started the process of getting Kari to have the surgery, described in this article.
Whether or not scabies is widespread in the jail on Stock Island, I cannot say for sure. Kari believes it is. I hear local physicians treat scabies and MRSA ongoing, and it’s not just homeless patients.
Here are links to images of MRSA and scabies, so you can see what these two domestic terrorists look like. I have had them both. Pray neither make your acquaintance.
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MRSA – Google Search
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Scabies – Google Search
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Something is seriously wrong if conditions are this bad at KOTS and the jail. While in jail they must take care of health issues. The health department has the duty to investigate and correct. This opens up the ability to bring a lawsuit that could be costly.
If tourist get wind of the unsafe conditions they will not risk traveling to Key West. Can anyone imagine if a local or tourist goes to jail and ends up getting scabies.
Do hope she gets the needed help.