‘I just want to know what happened’
Deaths at Mount Carmel leave families wondering.
Their grief COLUMBUS — is shared; their heartbreak universal.
Parts of their stories are similar, but their pain could not be more personal.
Of the 34 critically ill patients who Mount Carmel Health System officials say were given excessive doses of painkillers, at least 16 have been publicly identified. The Dispatch sat down with members of three of those families, who shared memories of their loved ones, laid bare the emotions of the day they died and discussed how they say Dr. William Husel has upended their lives.
A heartbroken daughter clings to memories and old photos.
An angry widow is just fighting to survive.
A grieving multi-generational family can’t ignore the empty chair at the kitchen table.
Janet Kavanaugh
She finally had been able to push the ugly image from her mind, the one in which her mother lay dying on a hospital bed with a single tiny tear in the corner of her eye. It was a tear that Janet Kavanaugh’s daughter, Elizabeth, took as a sign that her mom knew this moment was goodbye.
Her grief had far from subsided and her heart wasn’t nearly mended, but by the time a year had passed since her mother died at 6:03 a.m. on Dec. 11, 2017, in Mount Carmel West’s intensive-care unit, Elizabeth finally thought she might be able to carry on after all.
Elizabeth, 57, who asked that her last name not be used, had stopped reflexively reaching for the phone whenever she had something funny or exciting to share. She was sleeping again, and was hoping that her mother would visit her dreams. And after decades of the two of them playing Final Jeopardy together every night by phone, Elizabeth was able to watch the game show again without sobbing.
She had just made it through that critical year of firsts — Christmas, the anniversary, the day that would have been her mother’s 80th birthday, when a party for the ages had been talked about forever. Then came the phone call. “I remember words like ‘transparency’ and ‘investigation’ and ‘expedited her death,’” Elizabeth said about the Dec. 28 call she got from Mount Carmel telling her that 79-year-old Janet had been given a significantly high dose of painkillers the morning that she died.
The moment seemed unreal, but the news sunk in soon enough: Husel — who now stands accused of ordering the excessive doses of painkillers to 34 patients who all died in the Mount Carmel Hospital System between February 2015 until he was fired on Dec. 5 — might have killed her mom.
“They — that doctor, that medical team — they made a decision that was not theirs to make,” Elizabeth said last week, the tears streaming down her cheeks faster than she could wipe them away. “What they took that day was a chance at one little miracle. Could my mother have lived? We never will know.”
The Kavanaugh family filed the first lawsuit last month against Mount Carmel, Husel and others. At least 13 more have followed.
Husel hasn’t commented publicly, personally or through his lawyers. Hospital executives have apologized and said they’ve made changes.
For months, the attorneys at the Columbus law firm of Leeseberg & Valentine had had the paperwork from Janet’s death because Elizabeth had always felt that something had gone wrong in her mother’s care. Janet’s rapid decline during a shortterm stay at a rehab center after a bout with shingles, her admission to Mount Carmel on Nov. 24, and her sudden death simply made no sense to Elizabeth.
Attorney Anne Valentine said Elizabeth “was in a tailspin already and torn about taking any legal action at all.”
But then came the second call from Mount Carmel, this one on Jan. 14, to tell her that patients other than her mother were involved.
“I was angry and I was devastated. As bad as my mother’s death was ... this is worse. My mother was a nurse who spent her whole life helping those who could not help themselves, and look what they did to her.”
In hindsight, some of what happened to her mother that morning now makes more sense to Elizabeth. Although in the ICU for more than a week with a grim prognosis related to an infection, Janet had taken a turn for the better. Her care team had been making plans to move her to a step-down unit. That’s why the call summoning Elizabeth to the hospital about 3 a.m. on Dec. 11 was so shocking.
The family arrived at the West Side hospital and was escorted into a private room, where Elizabeth said a chaplain and Husel were present. The doctor, described by Elizabeth as kind, told her that her mom was dying and asked what she wanted to do. After taking a few minutes to discuss it, Elizabeth told Husel to remove the ventilator he had put in after her heart stopped and she had been revived.
Husel, she said, told her he would give her mother something to make her comfortable.
In just a few minutes, she recalled, the doctor told the family, “You should come back now, it won’t be long.”
Moments later, Janet was dead.
Now, that strikes Elizabeth as so strange: “How did he know it wouldn’t be long?”
As more details became public about the accusations against Husel and of the 23 pharmacists, nurses and managers who have been suspended while the hospital system, Columbus police homicide detectives and the government investigate, Elizabeth’s anger only deepened and her rekindled grief swallows her some days.
“My mother wasn’t a bag of bones, and this was no mercy killing,” she said. “Two months before her death she was living alone in a house she cared for herself, driving, and doing her own grocery shopping. She was old and sick, but she wasn’t terminal.”
Janet was a hippie at heart — one who always regretted not going to Woodstock — and a talented knitter, a voracious reader, a loyal friend and a rabid professional wrestling fan who acted like a lady but swore like a sailor. Now, all Elizabeth has left are memories and questions.
She is private, and so was her mother. Filing the lawsuit was not an easy decision, she said.
“I just want to know what happened,” Elizabeth said. “A lawsuit forces the hospital to make changes because it’s the only way to tell those in charge that you standing there in front of a camera and saying you’re sorry isn’t enough.”
Troy Allison
Christine Allison doesn’t want to be so angry. She doesn’t want to take the anti-anxiety pills she needs just to be able to get out of bed. She doesn’t want to cry herself to sleep at night anymore.
She wants only one thing, really, but no one can ever give her that.
She wants her husband back.
“Troy didn’t have a terminal illness,” she said through tears. “Troy had the rest of his life ahead of him.”
Troy Allison was 44 when he died at Mount Carmel West on July 15. He had been feeling poorly for a couple of weeks, dealing with nausea from an antibiotic that he was taking to help his cellulitis. Late on July 14, his wife called an ambulance for him because he was hyperventilating. Less than three hours later, he was dead.
His death certificate says he died of cardiopulmonary arrest. But his widow wants the doctor charged with murder.
“He’s not God,” Christine said of Husel. “And he doesn’t get to decide” who lives and who dies.
Her attorneys say hospital records show the doctor gave Troy a potentially lethal dose of 1,000 micrograms of fentanyl.
Like so many of the other families, Christine said so much of what happened the night her husband died just didn’t add up until she got the phone call from the hospital in late December, telling her about the fentanyl.
“It was like someone turned the light on,” she said.
Christine said her love story with Troy was storybook. She said she fell for him immediately when he came into what was then the Granville Street Tavern in Gahanna, where she worked, to play darts and and drink a couple of bottles of Bud Light.
They had dated about seven years when Troy hid an engagement ring inside a new coffee pot one Christmas morning. The following April, they went to Las Vegas and paid $100 to get married in the “Little White Chapel” on Friday the 13th. “It was my lucky day,” she said with a laugh. They’d been married 11 years when he died.
Troy was the perfect stepfather to Christine’s two children, she said. Life was good, even after a work-related crash mangled Troy’s hip. He had been off work three years, trying to get it fixed, and had gained some weight because of that. That led to high-blood pressure and diabetes, but the couple managed the illnesses as they came.
“He just wanted to get fixed up and get back to work,” Christine said.
As she spoke of her husband, she sometimes ran her fingers across the necklace that bears his thumbprint. It brings her comfort. And at home, she closes her eyes and imagines him reunited in heaven with his mom and his brother.
“I just miss him so much,” she said. Then she gets angry again. When she talks about the lawsuit she filed over Troy’s death, she mentions that she was raised to never hate anyone. Now she cannot stop herself.
“I hate this man. I hate this man. I hate this man,” she said of Husel.
She saw her husband in the emergency room, where doctors had to compress his chest to revive him. When they were finished, she said, a monitor showed he had a heart rate of 74.
Then the doctor said they were taking Troy to ICU, where Christine figured they would continue care.
But when she arrived on that floor, Husel met her in the hallway and had different news for her. “He said, ‘I am 99.9 percent sure there’s no brain activity. He’s dying. We’ll give him something to make him comfortable and we’re going to take the tube out and you’re going to say your goodbyes.’”
No discussion. No alternatives presented. No results of any brain scans shared. Nothing, Christine said.
And when she went in to see her husband in the ICU room, to hold his hand and kiss him one last time, a nurse told her Troy was already gone.
“I didn’t lose my husband,” Christine said through tears. “I lost my everything.”
Sue Hodge
The kitchen, anchored by its classic Formica table and retro Naugahyde chairs, is the very soul of the Hilltop house that Mary Jane Hundley shared with her sister.
It was in that kitchen that Jeremia “Sue” Hodge cooked mountains of food to feed her family, the neighbor kids and anyone else who might happen by.
It was in that kitchen that Mary Jane and Sue drank their sodas and solved the world’s problems.
It was to that kitchen that Sue’s five grown sons came whenever they sought advice.
Now, Mary Jane sits at that table each day with a broken heart that she says will never mend over the loss of her thrift-store partner, confidante and lifelong best friend.
“That’s my sister. She was always on my right. She was always there,” Mary Jane, 52, said through tears. “She was a part of me.”
Mary Jane was the last person to speak to her sister before she died on April 1. It was Easter evening when, after a big family celebration, Sue became short of breath and weak. Just after Mary Jane got Sue in the car to head for the hospital, she stopped breathing. Her sister called 911 and performed CPR.
Sue’s sons were summoned, and everyone followed the ambulance to the hospital.
Much of what followed remains a blur.
While in the emergency-room waiting room, Jeremiah Hodge said, he and his brothers just figured their mother had pneumonia. But soon, the Hodges were told that Sue needed to go for some heart tests. The more than a dozen relatives who had assembled moved to another waiting room. Soon, they were told there was no evidence of a heart attack and doctors were moving Sue to the ICU.
The Hodge family rode the elevator to that unit. There, they were met by Husel, Robert Hodge said. “That’s when the doctor comes out and said, “You know, something’s changed ... and, you know, there’s no chance.”
Husel acted professionally and respectfully, Robert said. But he presented no options, gave no alternatives. He told them if they made a decision to let Sue die, he would give her something to make her comfortable.
This is territory the family had been in before. While living in Mingo County, West Virginia, their father was sick for years. Four times he’d been hospitalized with his lung disease and tethered to a machine that breathed for him.
The last time, in the summer of 2010, doctors asked the family what to do. “They said if we take the ventilator off, he’ll die in 10 minutes,” Jeremiah said.
Together with Sue, the sons made the decision to remove the life-sustaining machine.
An hour later, their father was eating a Wendy’s Frosty and french fries. Then he shared pizzas with his grandkids in the ICU. A few days later, he went home.
“My dad lived the best eight months of his life after that,” Robert said. “And he died at home sitting in his recliner.”
They wonder now about the other families of Husel’s patients going through this pain and grief.
“I know how it feels. I can imagine all these other people are feeling the same thing,” 36-year-old Jeremiah said. “The same questions are rushing through their head just like they are rushing through ours. What if ? How? Could we have ...?”