My mother was refused further treatment (she had pneumonia and was clearly very respiratorily compromised) at a hospital in Houston - I forget the specific language but it was something like “defiant patient.”
I’m of two minds about whether their dismissal of her was ethical. On the one hand, she was an absolutely horrible human being at that point, screaming at everyone and totally unreasonable. On the other hand, she was under awful stress (her husband was slowly dying in the same hospital) and the hospital had treated her with steroids. Apparently steroids can make you totally crazy. Further, my mother insisted that she had a bad case of blastomycosis, and the doctors wouldn’t listen to her self-diagnosis. I’m not a doctor but the internet says that steroids will make a blastomycosis patient even worse.
So by one version of the story, the hospital justly threw out a patient who wouldn’t cooperate and who screamed obscenities at them. But by another version, the hospital itself contributed mightily to her craziness - suppose she really did have blastomycosis and they not only refused to consider that diagnosis when it was suggested, but made it worse with steroids, and then when the steroids had a documented effect, they threw her out instead of taking care of the problem that they made or at least exacerbated.
Personally I really don’t know. I suffered the brunt of her behavior at that time (along with my poor dying father) and I know that she was unbelievably toxic, irrational, and verbally hostile. In the hospital’s position, I would have wanted to toss her out too.
I am so sorry to hear this. The first (and so far, only) time my wife and I met you, you were in town for a surgery for your mom. If things were so dire at the time, we had no idea.