Lying in a hospital bed with an oxygen tube chewing her nostrils, the Black patient looked into her smartphone and, in a loud voice, complained about an experience that was too common among black people in America.
The patient, Susan Moore, said the white doctor at the hospital in the Indianapolis suburban area where she was treated for Covid-19 reduced her complaints about pain. He told her he felt uncomfortable giving her more narcotics, she said and suggested she be let go.
“I was crushed,” she said in a video posted to Facebook. “It made me feel like I was a drug bus.”
In her role, which has since been widely circulated on social media, she demonstrated control of complex medical terminology and complex knowledge of treatment protocols as she described in detail the ways in which she had applied her. do it herself with the medical staff. She knew what to ask because she was, too, a medical doctor.
But that was not enough to get him treated and the respect she said she deserved. “I put it out and I’ll keep it out if I was white,” she said in the video, “I wouldn’t have gone through that.”
She was finally sent home, and on Sunday, just more than two weeks after the video was posted, Moore, 52, died of complications from Covid-19, her son Henry Muhammed said.
Moore ‘s case has caused uproar and renewed calls to engage in biased medical treatment for Black patients. A voluminous study suggests that black patients often receive lower treatment than their white peers, especially when it comes to pain relief.
“It has made a huge impact,” said the Council of Dr. Christina, a primary care physician in Maryland who is Black, from Moore’s experience. “At times when we think of medical bias, it seems to have been taken away. We can sit there and say, ‘Okay, it can happen to someone who may be poorer.’ But when you see it happen to a colleague, and you see her in the hospital bed and literally pleading for her life, it just strikes in a different way and strikes home and say, ‘Wow, we need to do something. ‘”
A spokesman for Indiana University Health, the hospital system where Moore complained about abuse, said in a statement that he could not comment on specific issues because of privacy laws.
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“As an organization committed to equality and reducing racial discrimination in health care, we take genuine allegations of discrimination and investigate all allegations,” the statement said. She said: “We stand by the commitment and knowledge of our carers and the quality of care provided to our patients every day.”
A complex combination of socioeconomic and health factors has made Covid-19 particularly devastating to Black and Latino communities. Black people have died at 3.6 times as many as white people, and Latinos at 2.5 times as many as white people, according to a study by the Brookings Institution.
Moore tested positive for the coronavirus on Nov. 29 and was admitted to the hospital, according to her Facebook post, which she wrote on Dec. 4. She wrote that she had to persuade the doctor treating her to remdesivir , some antiviral drugs doctors use to treat Covid-19.
Moore said she had a scan of her neck and lungs after her doctor denied she was short of breath, despite being told she was, and after telling her he couldn’t justify giving her more narcotic painkillers. The scan found problems – lung infiltrates and new lymphadenopathy, she said – so she began receiving more opioid pain medication. But she said she was left in pain for hours before a nurse gave her the dose.
“This is how black people are killed, when you send them home and they don’t know how to fight for themselves,” Moore said.
Moore’s experience reflects what many Black professionals say they have met on a regular basis. Education cannot protect them from abuse, they say, whether in hospital or other settings.
Moore was born in Jamaica, Michigan. She studied engineering at Kettering University in Flint, Michigan, according to her family, and earned her medical degree from the University of Michigan School of Medicine.
She was no stranger to the challenges of getting proper medical care, said Muhammed, her 19-year-old son. She had sarcoidosis, an infectious disease that attacks the lungs, and was frequently treated in hospitals.
“Almost every time she went to the hospital she had to plead for herself, fight for something in some way, shape or form, just for a baseline, to get proper care,” she said. e.
In her struggle with the coronavirus at IU Health North Hospital in Carmel, Indiana, Moore wrote in an update on Facebook that she finally spoke to the chief medical officer of the hospital system, who assured her she would receive more care. better and diversity training was held. She got a new doctor, and her pain was better managed, she wrote.
But even as things seemed to improve at the hospital, Moore still felt that the care was not very good and that the medical staff was less responsive, according to Muhammed, who spoke to her every day. . Although she didn’t feel she was good enough to be released, she wanted to get home to take care of her parents, he said.
His mother was always putting others above herself, Muhammed said. She worked for an organization that assessed veterans to determine their degree of disability.
While fighting Covid-19 in the hospital, she took time to order him new slippers because he was broken, he said. In her last conversation with her, she told him that she was going to help him go to college.
“Even to the bitter end she was thinking of others,” Muhammed said.
The hospital discharged her on Dec. 7, he said, and she was slow and tired when she got home. The hospital called several times to check on her, he said, and when she did not respond, he sent an ambulance. His mother could barely walk and there was a deep breath when the ambulance arrived. She was taken to a different hospital 12 hours after being discharged from the previous one, she said on Facebook.
“Temperature spiked 103 and my blood pressure dropped to 80/60 with a heart rate of 132,” she wrote.
Moore said her care in the new hospital was compassionate and said she was being treated for a major bacterial infection other than Covid-19 pneumonia. Her position would deteriorate rapidly, however. The last time Muhammed spoke to her, just before she was put on an air conditioner, she was coughing so badly that she could barely speak, he said.
Doctors admitted her on Dec. 10, Muhammed said. Medical staff set up a Zoom call in her room, and more than a dozen friends spoke to her, hoping she would hear them even though she was unconscious, he said.
By last Friday, Moore had been 100 percent reliant on an ventilator to breathe, her son said, and doctors told him she might not do it. He visited her with his grandparents and told her that he loved her and not to worry about her.
“If you want to fight, now is the time to fight,” he recalled telling her. “But if you have to go, I understand.”
Two days later, Moore’s heart stopped beating.