
Neil Armstrong’s Death, and a Stormy, Secret $6M Settlement - mhb
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/us/neil-armstrong-wrongful-death-settlement.html
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curiousgal
> _In a scorching July 2014 email to the hospital’s lawyers, Wendy R.
> Armstrong, a lawyer and the wife of Mr. Armstrong’s son Mark, noted that
> Mark and his brother, Rick, would soon be traveling to Florida to speak at a
> ceremony marking the 45th anniversary of the first moon landing.

“This event at Kennedy Space Center will receive national news coverage,”
Wendy Armstrong wrote. “Rick and Mark have been solicited by several book
writers and filmmakers for ‘information about Neil that no one already
knows.’” The lawyer suggested that unless the parties reached a quick
settlement, the hospital would be publicly criticized for giving lethally
flawed care to one of America’s most famous and revered public figures._

Well that's nice, a touch of blackmail is always nice.

Regardless of the care being flawed, he was 82 years old! It's hard not to
paint the family as opportunistic and greedy.

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neonate
[http://archive.is/hdGqi](http://archive.is/hdGqi)

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dfeojm-zlib
A similar situation happened to my grandfather: a hospital's medical error
caused pneumonia and wrecked his lungs. He could've lived another 10-15 years
because he was relatively healthy. He wasn't Neil Armstrong and that side of
the family wasn't astute enough to sue, at least to hold them accountable for
their actions. :(

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redlizard
_“If it was me, I would try medical therapy first, but it depends on how
severe the pain is,” Dr. Mack said._

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/health/neil-armstrong-
hea...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/health/neil-armstrong-heart-
surgery.html?module=inline)

If someone was 82, and a quality-of-life surgery is elected to be performed,
it is always the patient and the doctors making that decision. Surgeries can
go wrong, they carry risk, heart surgery more so, heart surgery with an 82
year old even more so. Should we be holding the health care system
accountable? Even when the risks are known? Do we all of a sudden have the
expectation that every open heart surgery will be successful and no one will
die? Hospitals shouldn't be rewarded for failures, but placing full blame on
an organization with an impossible mandate seems a little bit unfair.

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Spooky23
As someone who lost a loved one to cdiff and mrsa infections, I would hope to
expect a basic level of competence in a hospital, which is increasingly not
there.

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reallydude
Having personally had 3 open heart surgeries (where they remove your heart, do
work and put it back), it's important to pay attention to which hospitals are
the best at which types of care.

Veteran care has improved drastically since the first Bush administration
(might have been started with Clinton, I dunno for sure). Cheney used VA
hospitals for full body scans, etc which my father casually used as a reason
to get his own. All veterans are equal in the VA now.

Largely, hospitals ALL have a basic level of competence in the US (meaning
medical training and certification and subject to regulation) and it's
disrespectful to imply otherwise. There is no benefit to people dying in a
hospital. Nobody wins and the penalties are stiff. The staff are people, which
are imperfect (often overworked) and situations are fluid.

The idea that opening him up again was going to save him, is tenuous. It would
not surprise me to find the implant wires caused angina; given his history it
would be warranted that a nurse would move the patient to cath, since the
heart can only survive so many "insults". A nurse is not a doctor and doctors
(especially cardiologists) are RARELY walking around, especially in that
facility at that time. The nurse made a call and a patient died that may have
died anyway waiting for a doctor to make the decision.

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Spooky23
> Largely, hospitals ALL have a basic level of competence in the US (meaning
> medical training and certification and subject to regulation) and it's
> disrespectful to imply otherwise. There is no benefit to people dying in a
> hospital. Nobody wins and the penalties are stiff. The staff are people,
> which are imperfect (often overworked) and situations are fluid.

No way. Look at the Centers for Medicare Services ratings and check out the
shitshow that lower rated hospitals are. When you see high cdiff infections,
that’s a sign of general incompetence — poor hygiene, undertrained or
untrained staff, or insufficient staffing levels.

Disrespect is allowing patients to suffer needlessly. The people running those
facilities deserve none.

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dmead
fucking terrifying. I had open heart surgery 3 weeks ago with one of the
surgeons named in the article (bavaria).

My pacing wires were removed by the ICU resident (a physician), not a nurse.
It's not a complicated thing, they just grab and pull. Maybe his wires were
implanted incorrectly so they damaged something when getting removed?

They also made it really clear that if you start bleeding during a cath
procedure then they crack your chest open immediately. Not sure what they
thought could happen in the cath lab if he was already bleeding internally.

it's such a shame, they fucked up badly but i couldn't even imagine being part
of the OR team that lost Neil Armstrong.

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mellosouls
Sad footnote to one of the greatest of lives.

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opwieurposiu
Korolev is also rumored to have died due to hospital error:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev#Death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev#Death)

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Juan_Largearm
Paywalled

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mellosouls
Yup, tho I can access it ok without an account. Limit I guess.

Alternative here:

[https://time.com/5633280/neil-armstrong-estate-6-million-
set...](https://time.com/5633280/neil-armstrong-estate-6-million-settlement/)

~~~
Juan_Largearm
Perfect, thank you very much

