Hospital Staff Shuns Dying Brooklyn Woman

This Isn't the First Time a Patient Died in the Emergency Waiting Room

It happens more than we probably know - patients dying in hospitals. And I'm not talking about the Grey's Anatomy, House or ER picture either, where doctors and emergency room staff are obviously overworked and despite dealing with their own personal drama put everything aside to do their damndest to give that dying patient their all. Sometimes their best isn't enough and patients die. It's difficult for the families to hear the bad news whether it's television or reality.

It's more like the apathy of hospital staff toward patients in need of medical help. In the media we've seen patients dying in the hospital because they were being ignored by the emergency room staff. Over a year ago, Edith Isabel Rodriguez, 43, lay bleeding on the emergency room floor at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital in Los Angeles. Ironically, in the City of Angels there was nothing heavenly about the events that transpired at the hospital. Rodriguez was throwing up blood and the only hospital staffer to come near her was a janitor who proceeded to mop up the blood around her. After realizing that the staff was unwilling to help her two separate calls were placed to 911 to get her moved to a different hospital. One was by her boyfriend, the second by a female bystander. But the calls were made in vain because the unwillingness to help spread from the emergency room staff to the 911 dispatchers as they refused to send an ambulance to the hospital to transport Rodriguez somewhere else. She died of a perforated bowel and many experts said she would have survived had she been treated sooner.