THE PATIENTS
Mistake ends veteran's bond with military
* Eb Davis' wife died in 1994 after a nurse anesthetist gave her the wrong
medication.
By Russell Carollo Dayton Daily News
Published: Friday, October 10, 1997
YELM, Wash. - Eben E. Davis gave both ear drums and the better part of two
fingers to the Army - the results of an explosion occurring as he cleared
bombs from a firing range.
He feels he did his part for the Army.
"We had a bond with the service,' Davis said.
That bond ended the day Florence, his wife of 44 years, was wheeled into an
operating room at Madigan Army Medical Center near Tacoma.
Eb Davis at the grave of his wife, Flo, who died when a military nurse anesthetist gave her the wrong medication.
SKIP PETERSON / DAYTON DAILY NEWS
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The way Davis sees it, the Army didn't do its part that day.
`They took something very dear and close to me away," Davis said. "It still
hurts. It's unbearable at times."
Florence Davis died April 23, 1994, after she was given the wrong bag of
medication.
A doctor didn't administer the medication. It was administered by a nurse
anesthetist named Robert Earl Hale.
"The bags look the same. The labels look the same," Hale said. "I didn't
read what was on that."
Fourteen months earlier, Sarah McLean began screaming and feeling pain down
to her toes after Hale gave her spinal anesthesia, she said in a deposition.
On the day Hale treated McLean, there was no anesthesiologist in the room.
The operation left her confined to a wheelchair and without full control of
her bladder. The Army settled the case for $700,000.
In his deposition, Hale didn't recall hearing McLean scream, and he also
denied that the screams indicated he struck a nerve in her back.
An outside consultant that reviewed the case found no fault in what he had
done, Hale said. But Hale acknowledged he made a mistake when he gave Florence
Davis the wrong medication.
Davis won his lawsuit, and the government paid more than $1 million -
bringing to at least
Davis holds his favorite photo of his wife, Flo, taken behind
their home on Lake Lawrence in Yelm, Wash. |
$1.7 million the amount taxpayers paid on the two cases
involving Hale.
The money hasn't eased the pain for Eben Davis, who served 25 years in the
Army.
He still cries when he sits at his kitchen table and looks out at the boat
dock his wife loved so much. He talks about her as if she were still alive,
expected to return any minute to the dream house where they lived alongside a
lake.
Davis walked across his kitchen and grabbed his favorite picture of his
wife, the one showing her holding a fish. He put the photograph on the kitchen
table so he could look at it while he talked about what happened to her.
`She's crazy about fishing. We kept a record of the fish we caught. My
fishing buddy is gone. I couldn't go fishing last year. There's no enjoyment
in it any more.... I keep the house up as she would, as if she's going to come
up the driveway and check me out."
After Florence Davis died, the Army allowed Hale to continue to administer
anesthesia but put him under closer supervison by an anesthesiologist - the
way it's often done at large civilian hospitals.
After six months of supervision, he left Madigan and went to work at an
Oregon hospital.
"You can probably handle being alone. I can't," Eben Davis said of his life
now. "It's hard. She's my whole life. She still is.'
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