Monday morning at dialysis one of the inmates was carted off in an ambulance.
The thing about dialysis patients, you see the same people 3+ times a week. You hear them chatter about their lives. You meet some of their people. You feel like a connected group. A sick group, but a group. Almost familial.
Of course we were all really concerned about Edith. The staff knows rumors grow fast and worry creates fear, so they give a brief account, if the family allows. They usually do. They know the connection.
Edith is/was a very heavy type 2 diabetic in late stage kidney failure.
She has been telling about her niece living with her and how she was doing so much more than required.
Well, said niece decided to cure Edith of her diabetes. I don’t know why it was not detected earlier but Edith was not testing and taking her insulin. Possibly no insulin for several days. Well she got very sick.
The staff here decided she was in a diabetic crisis Monday and called 911.
Today they told us the niece bought and had Edith drinking apple cider vinegar and wearing these foot pads at night. You know the ones they sell to remove all manner of toxins from your body. The biggest scam ever. We know it.
Why didn’t Edith know it? She was an highschool educator for many years.
Who can I blame?
I’m tempted to blame the niece. But she doesn’t seem all that bright. Why didn’t it become apparent more quickly that staff here noticed?
She surely has had doctor appointments since the niece took over her in-home care.
Depending on her age and overall physical condition (which was clearly pretty poor, from your description), her decision-making and discernment skills may have been compromised by her health issues.
She may simply have trusted a family member too much.
She may well have realized that her health issues weren’t curable, and were progressively worsening, and that her current treatments were just prolonging a difficult, debilitating situation; that all may have made her willing to try something “outside the box,” even with a low chance of success.
When people get desperate and see that conventional medicine is only delivering progress 1 inch at a time, or maybe even not at all - just hovering in status quo - they can be tempted to break the glass and try drastic (disastrous) “solutions” that promise something faster and easier.
First off, I’m sorry you lost a part of your community. Loss is difficult, and these circumstances only compound it.
Not being bright does not absolve her from blame. I agree with @Chronos . The authorities should consider charging the niece with something, maybe negligent homicide or involuntary manslaughter. And you never know: perhaps the niece was looking for an inheritance sooner rather than later. Motive and means.
Yeah; getting your chronically-ill aunt to stop her conventional medications in place of woo, even if done without any ulterior motives, but just out of misguided trust in quack treatments, might well be grounds for investigation into charges of negligent homicide. The fact that the niece had apparently become Edith’s day-to-day caregiver probably would be a factor, too.
Unless the niece is actually mentally impaired (as opposed to just “not bright”), that wouldn’t be a defense.
And, because I should have said so earlier: Beck, I’m sorry for the loss of your friend.
Beck, I’m so sorry you lost someone who was a significant member of your world. Edith was dependent on the niece for care. If the niece talked all the time about how apple cider vinegar is known to cure diabetes but “Big Pharma” doesn’t want anyone to know that insulin weakens the endocrine system, making diabetes worse; or some such rot, The dependency, which can become mental as well as physical, and the alternative medicine nonsense might have taken root in Edith’s mind.
As for why someone didn’t notice, Edith may well have lied. Maybe she thought that one day she’d march into the doctor’s office or dialysis and announce she was free from diabetes and felt great. It’s hard to say.
When we’re desperate for answers, accepting that there was nothing anyone could do under the circumstances can be brutally hard.
No the niece was not intellectually handicapped. Just seemed dull as a dish rag.
Not very conversational. Mostly asleep with headphones in, when I saw her. It’s quite early to be really friendly. So I excused it. She didn’t owe me an explanation.
Legal question here. Can somebody be charged with a crime if they convince another person to stop taking proper medical treatment? (Let’s assume there isn’t a guardian relationship.)
I’m so sorry to hear about Edith. I hate hearing about people suffering because they fell for something like that.
Why didn’t she know? As others have mentioned, her condition was probably some of the reason. But I’ll give you two words:
Steve Jobs.
He was by all accounts a very smart guy. He got pancreatic cancer, but was “lucky” enough to get the rare form of it that’s actually treatable, and potentially even curable.
If he’d listened to medical science, he’d probably still be alive today. But instead, he went off on the woo wagon, trusting in holistic medicine and other quackery, and by the time he might have caught on (I’m not sure if he ever did), it was too late.
Sometimes the smartest people can fall for the dumbest things, and all the rest of us can do is be sad and wish they’d have listened. But you can’t make people listen, unless they can be proven to be mentally deficient. It’s maddening, but sad.
Again, sorry about Edith. I hope her niece at least has the grace to feel bad about killing her.
Just a note here that it’s questionable whether Jobs’ 9-month delay in getting surgery for his slow-growing tumor (while pursuing woo) had a real impact on his prognosis. Maybe, maybe not.
True enough.
Another case getting attention currently is that of a young woman, Paloma Shemirani, diagnosed with a B-cell lymphoma that reportedly had a very good prognosis. Her mother, a woo-prone ex-nurse allegedly steered her away from mainstream therapy; the result of her choosing woo instead was fatal.
Sometimes even intelligent people have blind spots and/or fall under the sway of charismatic or controlling relatives.
I hope her niece at least has the grace to feel bad about killing her.