Mirror photo by Patrick Waksmunski Theresa Carter looks at a collage of family photos at her Altoona home that was used at her husband, Ken Carter’s, wake services. He ended up in a physical rehabilitation facility with partial paralysis after a neurosurgeon at UPMC Altoona failed to diagnose a mild stroke.

In recent months, there have been numerous phone calls to the Mirror from UPMC Altoona patients, patients’ loved ones and employees, who’ve outlined troubling experiences they’ve had at the local hospital — most of which seem to be related to a shortage of nurses and other employees.

Quadriplegic Brandon Lawrence has considered suicide during his nine-month stay at UPMC Altoona, due to what he calls persistent neglect and negativity from overworked nurses.

“It’s the worst time I’ve ever experienced,” said Lawrence, who is paralyzed from a gunshot wound received in a home invasion when he was at a friend’s house 15 years ago.

He credits a “heaven-sent” crisis counselor who “walked me back from the abyss.”

Lawrence said he reached out to the Mirror because he has failed so far to find an agency willing to provide home care, so that he can leave, and is hopeful that telling his story will encourage an agency to offer help.

He said he sees disrespect and negligence from nurses due to their high caseloads, although some manage to show empathy and compassion.

While the manager on his floor is “great” and “makes things happen,” that manager isn’t always around, he said, noting that weekends are hardest, because staffing levels are lower.

The first time he thought of suicide, he was thirsty, and while there were three full bottles of flavored water sitting in front of him, he couldn’t get anyone to help him drink.

“I’m sitting here staring at these Propels, and I’m thirsty and can’t drink,” he said. “Do you know how torturous that is?”

Other issues include delays receiving dinner and getting pain medications, lack of attention to special needs and an overall buildup of frustration, he said.

He has contemplated biting his tongue so that he could bleed to death, he said.

He’s had confrontations with staff and with hospital police, who have tried to “intimidate” him, charging him with terroristic threats and harassment, he said.

One nurse accused him of acting like a 2-year-old and another threw a phone at him, hitting his leg, he said.

Lawrence has filed several grievances with the hospital’s patient relations coordinator, who has responded by outlining ways in which the hospital might serve him better.

“The unit director of the 11th floor continues to educate and coach staff regarding the importance of dignity and respect and the need to respond to your call bell in a timely manner,” the coordinator stated in one response. “We acknowledge the delays responding to your call bell, and we apologize for these wait times.”

Problems like Lawrence has experienced are related to not having enough employees, according to Kim Heverly, president of the SEIU Healthcare PA local that represents the registered nurses at UPMC Altoona.

“UPMC’s chronic short staffing and the ongoing practice of MaxSurge staffing by hospital management has stretched nurses to our limit,” Heverly wrote in an email. “We know that it has had a profound impact on patients and their families.”

Beth Ann Lechner’s husband was in the hospital receiving palliative care for pancreatic cancer for a week, during which he was in distress for not getting pain medications on time and for not being taken to the bathroom before he had a bowel movement in his bed, Lechner said.

“It was actually, to be honest, traumatic,” Lechner said. “It’s hard enough watching someone with cancer, then to go through that.”

When he first went in, her husband was placed in “a room like a hole” in the Emergency Department, Lechner said.

There was no nurse stationed there, and a nurse came back only when there was enough time, she was told.

After two days, he got a room, but nurses weren’t “consistent” with pain meds, even though pancreatic cancer is highly painful, and even though “he kept pressing the call button,” Lechner said.

She complained to administration, but nothing changed, she said.

Once, her husband called her at home at 1 a.m., moaning.

She called the hospital, asking a nurse in admittedly “nasty” fashion that she give her husband the meds he needed, she said.

The nurse then went into her husband’s room, berating him for potentially getting her ‘“in (expletive) trouble,'” Lechner said.

“I was dumbfounded,” she said.

At another point, around dawn, her husband called her at home, crying, saying that he’d been ringing his call bell for 45 minutes, that no one had come and that “he went in his pants,” Lechner said.

“‘Mrs. Lechner, if you don’t like the care he’s getting, you can discharge him AMA (against medical advice),'” the nurse said, according to Lechner.

She came to the hospital and cleaned up her husband.

The experience was humiliating for him, she said.

Staffers failed to care for a bedsore and failed to bathe her husband and change his sheets, forcing her to do those things, she said.

Nurses were “running around like chickens with their heads cut off,” and one in the ER was “bawling her eyes out” due to stress, Lechner said.

She finally demanded a transfer to Pittsburgh, she said.

Her husband went to UPMC Presbyterian, where he was placed into intensive care, she said.

In Pittsburgh, that care was “absolutely wonderful,” Lechner said.

Charles Dolansky, who has diabetes, went to UPMC Altoona with the second toe of his left foot swollen and seeping and spent two days on a gurney in the hallway in the “chaos” of the Emergency Department, never getting the help he needed, he said.

They found a bed for him on an upper floor, where he was treated “OK” for three days.

They discharged him after having done an ultrasound and probably a culture, and after having planned to do a CAT scan, which they never did.

He went home and that night couldn’t sleep, as his toe was throbbing, still seeping and turning red, so that it was almost purple.

His son took him to Conemaugh Memorial Medical Center in Johnstown about 5 a.m., where they amputated the toe, out of concern the problem would spread into the bones of his foot and leg.

He’s been a patient of UPMC Altoona for years, and this is the first time he received substandard care, he said.

“It’s going down the tubes,” he said.

Deb Mackesy spent 16 “horrible” hours in the Emergency Department, most of the time in the waiting room, where people were “frustrated and yelling.”

Mackesy, 69, has COPD, and she’d been throwing up for a week, with a pain in her right side and a sore throat.

She thought she had a gallbladder problem.

Hospital workers gave her an IV, so they could take a urine specimen, draw blood, take a chest X-ray and a CAT scan of her abdomen and gave her an antibiotic and an anti-emetic.

“It turns out I have a kidney infection,” she said.

She wasn’t any better a few days later, she said.

She doesn’t blame the staff and feels sorry for them, she said.

There aren’t enough workers, she said.

She was surprised “they stayed nice for all the people there and the way they were being treated,” she said.

It’s no wonder there’s a nursing shortage, she said. “I’d quit too.”

She has UPMC health insurance, and relies on public transportation, so she must use UPMC Altoona — in which she “has very little faith,” she said. “I’m stuck.”

Ed Drzewiecki spent 24 hours in the Emergency Department and found the scene to be more disturbing than what he witnessed as a corpsman in Vietnam.

He ultimately didn’t receive the care he needed there — although he did get the necessary care shortly afterward at Conemaugh Nason Medical Center in Roaring Spring, he said.

The nurses and doctors at UPMC Altoona were doing their best, but couldn’t keep up, Drzewiecki said.

They took his blood pressure, hooked him to a heart monitor and gave him lasix, but nothing else, he said.

A doctor said he seemed to have a little excess water in his system, or his magnesium or potassium was too low.

Several days later, with similar symptoms, he went to Nason, and they determined that he had a thyroid problem, based on irregular test results, and that he also had a bladder infection.

He went home after two hours with pills for the thyroid condition and an antibiotic, feeling better.

At UPMC Altoona, it was “hurry, hurry, hurry” for the nurses, who were “running amok,” Drzewiecki said.

At one point, he had to use a urinal. He held down his sweatpants while lying on a gurney in the hall in front of the nurses’ station.

It was embarrassing, he said.

At another point, he could see from his gurney into a room where an older woman opened her eyes, which then rolled back into her head as she died — after which they relocated him to another spot in the hall.

He got nothing to drink during his 24 hours at UPMC Altoona, except soda that his son brought in. He got nothing to eat, either, except a hamburger he grabbed as he was leaving.

On the way out, he saw a full waiting room with perhaps 100 people, some lying against walls, some sleeping on chairs.

“It was maxed out,” Drzewiecki said. “It was a joke.”

Tracy Mattern’s 84-year-old father waited three days in an Emergency Department room before the hospital transferred him to a rehabilitation facility across town — a couple months after he spent 18 hours on a gurney in an Emergency Department hallway, before moving to a bed upstairs.

There were unclean restrooms in the Emergency Department, harried nurses that lacked the time to pay proper attention to her father, patients who were “stoned” and vomiting, and inadequate communication, Mattern said.

“We were just appalled,” she said in a phone interview. “I’d rather him go to Mount Nittany or Nason (in the future). Maybe he’ll get better care.”

Nurses were often too busy to help her father go to the restroom, a duty she and her sister fulfilled.

Years ago, before UPMC took over, conditions were different at the local hospital, she wrote in what was originally intended to be a letter to the editor. “Maybe because then it was a different time, and COVID didn’t exist,” she wrote.

She doesn’t blame the nurses, she wrote. “I blame the system and the people that oversee this hospital,” she wrote.

Mary Ann Buchanan’s husband went to UPMC Altoona’s Emergency Department in great pain, but after an initial assessment and after learning there’d be testing delays, he went to Conemaugh Nason, where a prompt diagnosis led to an emergency flight and a lifesaving operation in Johnstown.

At UPMC Altoona, a triage doctor felt her husband’s abdomen and ordered a blood test, which the Buchanans learned would mean waiting an hour for a blood draw and another hour for results.

At Nason, a doctor felt his abdomen, diagnosed a leaking aortic aneurysm and ordered a helicopter, so that he could go to Pittsburgh for care, Mary Ann said.

Before the helicopter arrived, the aneurism broke, forcing the helicopter team to take him instead to Conemaugh Memorial, where a doctor operated for six hours.

The surgeon in Johnstown said her husband, 68, “should be dead,” she said.

At Altoona, he had to wait 45 minutes before triage.

He couldn’t comfortably sit or stand, and although she asked for a bed to ease his pain, she was told there were none available, and that he needed to stay in the waiting room.

“His pain became unbearable,” she wrote. “He finally begged me to drive him to Nason or Tyrone.”

At Nason, he was “rushed right back to a bed,” followed by a quick blood draw, an ultrasound, stomach palpation, the diagnosis and the helicopter ride, she said.

The care in Johnstown was “perfect,” with the operation beginning about two hours and 20 minutes after they’d left UPMC Altoona, followed by six days in intensive care, she said.

Her husband “absolutely” would have died had he stayed in Altoona, said Mary Ann — although that judgment is speculative.

Her husband had two heart attacks in December and went for care both times to UPMC Altoona.

“I can’t complain about those,” she said.

Patrick Pielmeier came to UPMC Altoona for treatment of a stroke, but the hospital refused to sedate him to alleviate his claustrophobia for a needed MRI, leading to a confrontation, during which a hospital police officer and a male nurse physically abused him, Pielmeier said.

One nurse said the sedative would jeopardize his life. They accused him of refusing care. There was an argument. He refused to sign a paper related to leaving voluntarily.

Employees summoned a hospital police officer, who grabbed Pielmeier’s phone, with which he was preparing to record the encounter.

The officer said such a recording would violate federal privacy law. The officer also pushed Pielmeier back onto the bed.

Employees brought up a wheelchair, and a male nurse punched Pielmeier in the face, grabbing his neck and shoving him into the chair.

After that, Pielmeier went to Mount Nittany Medical Center, where he had a second stroke that he attributes to the stress of what happened at UPMC Altoona. At Mount Nittany, he received three MRIs, with sedation provided before each.

At UPMC Altoona, employees talked about being understaffed. But that’s not his problem, Pielmeier said.

“I was really frustrated,” said Pielmeier, who was at the hospital for 10 hours that day. “I know I can probably be an ass sometimes. But I didn’t deserve what happened.”

He’s hired a lawyer and expects to file a lawsuit.

“I signed nothing,” he said.

He’s been in contact with UPMC Altoona police, Altoona police and the Blair County District Attorney’s Office in a so-far unsuccessful attempt to hold accountable the police officer who grabbed his phone and pushed him. He has a partial recording of what happened. Hospital police planned to cite him for disorderly conduct, he said.

Theresa Carter’s husband, 73, ended up in a physical rehabilitation facility with partial paralysis after a neurosurgeon at UPMC Altoona failed to diagnose a mild stroke. Her husband had a more serious stroke the next day, Carter said.

He died in mid-July, six weeks later, and Theresa blames his death on that misdiagnosis.

It began when Ken Carter felt unsteady on his feet, followed by a call to his neurosurgeon, who wasn’t available. An on-call neurosurgeon asked them to go to the ER, Carter said.

At the ER, it took an hour to get into triage, after which they returned to the waiting room for two hours. That was followed by a non-contrast CAT scan, another hour in the waiting room, a contrast CAT scan, another stint in the waiting room, then a consultation with the on-call neurosurgeon, Carter said.

The neurosurgeon blamed her husband’s unsteadiness on a deep brain stimulator that had been implanted previously — even though the symptoms hadn’t dissipated after they’d turned off the stimulator before arriving at the hospital, Carter said.

After the consultation, they returned to the waiting room for two more hours, then learned that the neurosurgeon was recommending an MRI, which could take place the following day, because the ER was so busy, according to Carter.

Her husband could have remained in the ER overnight, but he’d have been in the hallway, because no rooms were available, she said.

So they went home, without objection from the triage doctor.

That evening, not content with waiting for the MRI at Altoona, Carter called Penn State Hershey Medical Center, which suggested she bring her husband there the following day.

The next morning, at their daughter’s house near Harrisburg, her husband’s condition worsened.

When they reached Hershey medical center, the doctors there said her husband was having “another stroke,” Carter said.

Their equipment showed that he’d had a milder one the day before.

Hershey performed an echocardiogram that showed her husband had atrial fibrillation, a condition that can lead to blood clots, which can cause strokes.

Hershey put her husband on blood thinners and implanted a device that, coupled with his phone, could message his doctor when he was in afib, enabling the doctor to send a signal to interrupt the irregularity.

After a time in Hershey, her husband went to an Altoona rehabilitation center, where he couldn’t move his right arm, couldn’t talk well and had no feeling in his toes, she said.

Ken died July 16 at UPMC Altoona.

“I don’t want this to happen to anybody else,” Carter said.

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