Birgilio Marin-Fuentes Dies in Hospital Parking Lot After ER Workers Refuse to Help Him
It may only be February, but the good workers of the Portland Adventist Medical Center's ER Unit just walked away our Biggest Assholes of the Year Award for Egregious Acts of Not Giving a Shit About a Dying Guy. Birgilio Marin-Fuentes told his wife he wasn't feeling well...
So the 61-year-old man told her he was going to the hospital. She offered to go along, but he said he'd handle it himself and would be back later. It didn't work out that way.
He had a heart attack, crashing his car just 150 feet from the emergency room door. He spent 20 minutes in the lot before a passerby noticed the accident and flagged down police. Soon, two officers were performing CPR, while two more ran to the emergency room for help.
And here's where the craven Portland Adventist staff enters the picture. Instead of rushing out to help the dying man, they actually told the cops to call 911 to summon an ambulance. That's protocol, they said. And they weren't budging.
So as officers desperately tried to save Birgilio's life, they had to actually wait for an ambulance to show up to carry him just 150 feet.
It would take them about 10 minutes to finally get a gurney to haul Birgilio into the ER. But he would die about 20 minutes later.
"They just felt really helpless," Sgt. Debbie Steigleder
told the Oregonian of her officers. "To know that literally 150 feet or so away there are doctors and nurses there...It's just extremely frustrating."
After the incident, Portland Adventist Hospital mouthpieces tried to claim they were merely following protocol, which to them is far more important than acting like a human. They said they sent a nurse, a supervisor and security to the parking lot, but that wasn't until after the ambulance had already arrived, according to police.
Dr. Kelli Westcott, head of the hospital's emergency services, said "We do call 9-1-1 to make sure trained responders can safely transport a patient to the emergency department. We activate the EMS system so the trained responders can safely transport you to the emergency department because we want to give everybody the timely care that they deserve."
But if that sounds like utter bullshit, that's because it is. By implication, she's trying to claim that not a single person in the emergency room was trained enough to transport a heart attack victim 150 feet.
Let's see you try to run that one by a jury, sweetheart. (
Special thanks to Texas Bureau Chief Leah for the tip.)
