When U.S. Army veteran Daniel Wilkinson began feeling ill last week, he went to Bellville, Texas, a hospital on the outskirts of Houston. His health problem was unrelated to COVID-19, but Wilkinson needed advanced care and, with the coronavirus filling the beds in intensive care, he could not get it in time to save his life.
“He loved his country,” his mother, Michelle Puget, told David Begnaud, CBS national correspondent This Morning. “He served two deployments in Afghanistan, came home with a purple heart and it was a gallstone that took him out.”
Last Saturday, Wilkinson’s mother rushed him to Bellville Medical Center, just three doors from his home.
But for Wilkinson, help was still too far away.
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Dr. Hasan Kakli, a Belville emergency physician, treated Wilkinson and found he had biliary pancreatitis, which Belville Hospital was not equipped to treat.
“I do labs, I have labs and labs come back, I’m on the computer and I have one of those moments‘ Oh, shit. ’ in the liver, it returns to the pancreas and begins to turn off these organs. His blood work even showed that his kidneys were closing. ”
Kakli told Begnaud that his patient was dying right in front of him. Wilkinson needed a higher level of care, but with hospitals across Texas and much of the south overwhelmed by patients with COVID, there was no room for him.
Kakli recalled making several phone calls to other facilities, only to receive a lot of “sorry … sorry … sorry,” in response. The sites had specialists to do the procedure, but because of the illness he had, Wilkinson needed intensive care and had no ICU bed to put him in.
“Then I’m at my computer and I scratch my head, and I have that thought in my head,‘ What if I put this on Facebook or something, maybe someone can help me? ? ‘A doctor sent me a message,’ Hey, I’m in Missouri. The last time I checked, we have ICU beds. We can do that, call that number. ‘ The next guy sends me a message, he’s a GI specialist, and he tells me, “I’m in Austin. I can do your procedure and get over it.” I said, “Very well, let’s go.” He replies to me five minutes later, “I’m sorry. I can’t get administrative approval to accept it, we’re full.” “
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For nearly seven hours, Wilkinson waited in an emergency bed in Belville.
“I had this thought in my head, ‘I need to bring your mother here right now,'” Kakli said.
“I also had to have the discussion with him.” “Dan,” I said, “if your heart stops in front of me here, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to do everything possible to revive you and try to get your heart back? If that happened, Dan, if you recovered, still we are in this position we are in right now. “
“She said,‘ I want to talk to my mom about this, ’” Kakli told CBS News.
Eventually, a bed was opened at VA Hospital in Houston. It was a helicopter ride.
Kakli recalled Wilkinson saying, “Oh man, after Afghanistan I promised myself I’d never be in a helicopter again … Oh, well, I guess.”
Wilkinson was flown to Houston, but it was too late.
“They couldn’t do the procedure for him because too much time had passed,” his mother told Begnaud. “They told me they had seen air pockets in their intestines, which means they were already starting to die. They told me I had to make a decision and I knew how Danny felt; I didn’t want that, we would all agree that we had to let him go. “
About 24 hours after entering the emergency room, Daniel Wilkinson died at age 46.
Kakli told Begnaud that if it weren’t for the COVID crisis, Wilkinson’s procedure would have taken 30 minutes and he would have walked out the door again.
“I have never lost a patient to this diagnosis,” Kakli said. “We know what needs to be done and we know how to treat it and we take them where they need to go. I’m afraid the next patient I see is someone who can’t get where they need to go.
“We’re playing music chairs, with 100 people and 10 chairs,” he said. “When the music stops, what happens? People from all over the world come to Houston for medical care, and right now, Houston can’t care for patients in the next city. That’s the reality.”
Last night, there were 102 people waiting for an ICU bed in the Houston area.
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo told Begnaud she was ready to open a field hospital, but as of Friday morning, hospitals in the Houston area told her they had extra beds, but there were no enough nurses. Seven hundred nurses arrived last week, but still not enough to meet demand.