schultz.qxd
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
I was particularly interested in the article because I had been considering conducting some researches of my own, much more informal than yours, into the causes of respiratory failure in certain hospital patients. Two close friends of mine died in recent years as a result of suffering unexplained respiratory failure while they were in the hospital for seemingly unrelated treatments. These patients were quite different from the ones whose deaths you investigated. My acquaintances were older women, in their 70s. However, neither had had respiratory systems compromised enough to account for their deaths.
The second of my acquaintances to die suffered a particularly arduous, puzzling series of setbacks. She experienced respiratory failure three times, each time just hours after being sent to a physical-therapy ward in anticipation of being discharged. After her second episode requiring code-blue intubation, I desperately urged the medical staff to consider allergic reactions to latex, to certain foodstuffs, etc. The hospital personnel didn’t think an allergy to latex could be implicated because they believed that exposure would have to be massive to cause respiratory failure. They believed that patients would virtually have to have had latex gloves shoved down their throats in order to suffer such systemic collapse. I’m not sure that the medical personnel were correct in this belief. But they did seem to make aggressive attempts to solve the mystery. They ran batteries of tests on her, including several MRI tests, trying to find the source of her respiratory failure in some neurologic anomaly. They weren’t able to find anything to account for her death, and they said the only comfort we could draw from the months of suffering she endured on a respirator was that this type of unexplained respiratory failure was rare, indeed almost unprecedented.
Rosalie M. Schultz
