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“This is how blacks are killed.”
These are just some of the last words of Dr. Susan Moore, MD, a GP in Carmel, Indiana, who was diagnosed with COVID-19 on November 29. But even her training as a doctor could not escape her from what she believed. She endured systemic racism while fighting for her life at Indiana University Health Hospital in Indianapolis.She died last Sunday
At the age of 52.
Moore, a Jamaican immigrant who came to the United States with her family in the early 70s, was a 3M industrial engineer for nearly a decade before enrolling in the University of Michigan School of Medicine. Her family says she was an honor student. A classmate in the medical school remembered her as “kind, hardworking, wonderful, and generous.”
Dr. Susan Moore and her son Henry
Moore, a single mother, was the only support for her two parents, who suffered from dementia and lived with her 19-year-old son, Henry Muhammad, a freshman studying engineering at Indiana University. A friend like Kimberly Knox, who has known Moore since college, said she is a phenomenal doctor who loves medical practice and helping people. “She was a very hardworking and caring person,” Knox said. “She just lit up when she was talking about medicine, her son, her parents, and she always defended her patients and made sure they were receiving proper care.”
By early December, according to Moore, hospital treatment was terrible. video On Facebook, I asked a fellow doctor to save her. She sat on a hospital bed with a nasal cannula on her nose and recorded a long complaint about the poor care she received.And because she was a doctor I knew that Better.
She had to ask for remdesivir, an antiviral drug used to fight COVID-19. Because her doctor initially claimed that she wasn’t eligible for more than one dose of the drug. “She knows that two doses aren’t enough to treat,” said Linda Burke, MD, an obstetrician and gynecologist in Orlando, Florida, who belongs to a private Facebook group with some of Moore’s colleagues. “. “The fact that she had to discuss it is shameful.”
In the video, Moore said her doctor also refused to give her narcotic painkillers, despite her intolerable pain. “All I can do is cry,” she said. He finally forgave when a subsequent CT scan revealed fluid and new blood clots in her lungs and swollen lymph nodes in her neck, but another five hours before she was relieved. It took. “He made me feel like a drug addict and knew I was a doctor. To treat my pain, I have to prove why I have something wrong. Is she secretly asking in the video? “If I were white, I wouldn’t have had to experience it.”
Evidence suggests that Moore’s anger was justified. Studies involving one Researcher at the University of California, San Francisco In 2016, we consistently show that black patients are half as likely to be prescribed narcotic analgesics as white patients.
Moore was worried that the video post might backfire, but Knox said he was happy and surprised by the hospital’s reaction. Moore was able to defend himself from the hospital bed and went up the chain of command to complain to the Chief Medical Officer of the IU Health System. She addresses her concerns and is committed to diversity training and hospital managers working to apologize from doctors who believe her treatment is very inadequate. Guaranteed to.
Moore’s care improved and she was subsequently discharged. “She just didn’t want to be in the hospital,” Knox said. But in less than 12 hours, her condition deteriorated rapidly. Her temperature soared to 103 ° F (39.4 ° C), her blood pressure dropped to 80/60, and her heart was running at 132 beats per minute. “These people were trying to kill me,” Moore later said in a Facebook entry about IU Health staff. “Obviously, everyone agreed to fire me soon.”
She checked in to another nearby hospital, the St. Vincent Health Center ( Medscape Medical News Before report, Black pediatrician Chanice Wallace died of childbirth in October).Moore was developing Bacterial pneumonia, And COVID-19 pneumonia, and her last Facebook entry showed that she was moved to the ICU, where she was on ventilator for 10 days. She died early in the morning of December 20th. Her son, Henry, authorized by the ICU, was at her bedside.
A representative of IU Health said he was sad to hear Moore’s death, but could not comment on a particular patient. “As an organization working to reduce fairness and racial disparity in health care, we take allegations of discrimination very seriously and are investigating all allegations,” a hospital spokeswoman said in a statement. Still, “We support the commitment and expertise of caregivers and the quality of care provided to patients daily.”
If Susan Moore had taken another care, would it still be alive? It’s a difficult question to answer.However, African Americans are mostly infected with COVID-19 3 times According to the National Urban League’s August 2020 report, based on data from Johns Hopkins University, the proportion of white Americans is twice as likely to die from the virus.
“She was so frustrated that her delay in treatment and her improper discharge could have made a big difference in her results,” Burke said.
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