A 25-year-old young man died at the end of September after waiting for hours to be treated in the emergency room. Corinne, her mother, and Damien, a patient who witnessed the scene, delivered chilling testimonies this Wednesday on RMC, while the family filed a complaint for manslaughter.
Lucas, 25, was carried away by death in the emergency corridors of Hyères hospital (Var), after a long wait, denounced by his family and a witness to the scene.
On September 30, this young man suffered from vomiting, fever, and pain in his ribs and lungs. He was suffering in his abdomen and had started calling SOS Médecins from home. When he saw that things were getting worse and worse, he finally called Samu, at 15. After 11 minutes of questioning, they decided that he needed to go to the emergency room. He was therefore transported by firefighters to Hyères hospital, where he endured an ordeal.
“Once he arrived in the emergency room, he was classified as less serious,” explains his mother Corinne on RMC this Wednesday.
“They put him on a stretcher, left him in a corridor and took care of him once at 8 p.m., then really from 9:30 p.m. when he became seriously unwell. He will have several cardiac arrests,” continues his mother. Elements corroborated by the testimony of another patient treated at the same time, and shocked by what happened.
“The pain seemed unbearable”
“(The first time) A person told him word for word that the cream he had eaten the day before was not fresh, and then she left without having examined it,” explains Damien, who was in the same hallway that evening.
Then, when Lucas became unwell, he was overwhelmed by the wait-and-see attitude of certain caregivers, while the young man’s heart rate was measured several times at more than 120 beats per minute at rest, according to the medical file submitted to the family.
“I told myself that it wasn’t possible. When he felt unwell, two nurses were passing by. He was moaning, he was in a state where the pain seemed unbearable, and they passed by,” denounces he says, while his mother Corinne is forced to wait outside the establishment, forced to only communicate by message with her son since the beginning of the afternoon.
A transfer was considered given the lack of space at the hospital, but it was too late. Lucas ultimately succumbed to septic shock, which is a sudden drop in blood pressure. The bacteria in question is a meningococcus which attacked him through the abdomen.
“We didn’t give him the slightest chance to escape”
The hospital would then have justified to Lucas’ mother that they would not have “enough doctors”, “not enough resources”, as she explained this Wednesday in The Big Mouths, on RMC.
In any case, his family filed a complaint last week, on December 12, for manslaughter. “The only thing I am certain of is that he was not taken care of,” explains Mr. Thomas Callen, the family’s lawyer.
“We didn’t take good care of him and we didn’t give him the slightest chance to escape,” he accuses.
“The death of Lucas must force a reflection”
Was there negligence or a lack of resources put in place in this establishment? “There is an obligation of means. If we come to the emergency room, it’s not to die,” breathes Damien, Lucas’ neighbor at the hospital. Shocked by the scene, he immediately wrote to Lucas’ family by registered mail.
His death should in any case “force reflection” according to the family’s lawyer. “So that it doesn’t happen again,” he concludes.
The hospital management did not wish to respond to RMC but assured that it would collaborate “fully” in the investigation. She says she associates herself “with the emotion that this death has aroused in the family”.