Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (9 page)

Ten minutes later, concerned that Swango still hadn’t finished, Ritchie entered the room, saw the closed curtains, and again asked if Swango needed any help. He said he didn’t. Three minutes later, Ritchie returned, opened the curtain, and looked in. This time she saw that Swango was using two or three syringes. One was stuck directly into the central line. Another was resting on Swango’s shoulder, as if he was waiting to insert it whenever the other syringe had emptied. Had Swango simply been using the syringes to clear the line, there should have been blood in them. But there was no blood. Swango again said he needed no assistance and Ritchie left the room.

Just a few minutes later, Ritchie saw Swango finally leave. “Good,” she thought to herself. “That’s finally over.” Whatever was wrong with Barrick’s line had evidently been corrected. Almost immediately—no more than ten seconds had elapsed—she went back into the room to check Barrick’s dressing where the central line entered the body.

Ritchie was stunned. Barrick had turned blue. She gave one terrifying shudder and gasp, then stopped breathing. Ritchie screamed “Code Blue! Code Blue!” then began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, desperately trying to get breath into Barrick’s lungs. She looked up and saw Dr. Swango coolly watching her from the back of the room, doing nothing to assist her or the patient. “That is so disgusting,” Swango said of her efforts at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, his voice tinged with contempt.

Still in shock, Ritchie stared at him in disbelief. “You jerk!” she shouted, before returning frantically to the patient. Other nurses and doctors rushed in and began chest compression, to no avail.

Ruth Barrick was dead.

The last entry in Barrick’s “physician progress notes” was made by Swango and dated February 6 at eleven
A.M
.:

PT [patient] suffered apparent respiratory arrest witnessed by R.N. No pulse present, Code Blue called at 10:25 hrs. PT did not respond to resuscitative measures . . . pronounced dead at 10:49. Dr. Joseph Goodman and family notified per Dr. Arlo Brakel.

Swango.

The death certificate cited the cause of death as “a. Cardiopulmonary arrest, due to, b. Cerebrovascular accident,” a stroke in lay terms.

Ritchie was astounded and appalled when Swango insisted he wanted personally to convey the news of Barrick’s death to her family members. (She later saw him leading relatives into a private room.) And she could hardly believe what she had witnessed. She was almost certain that something Swango had done had killed Barrick. Still, it never crossed her mind that he might have killed her deliberately. She assumed that he had accidentally allowed an air pocket to enter the central line, causing a fatal embolism in the bloodstream. Such accidents did sometimes happen, which was one of the reasons only doctors were allowed to adjust central lines. But why hadn’t Swango acknowledged the error? Why had he acted as he did? And what was he doing with those syringes?

These troubling questions were still swirling in Ritchie’s mind
that afternoon when she responded to an urgent call in another room. The head nurse, Amy Moore, was with a patient who was having serious trouble breathing. Ritchie was alarmed to see that Swango was also in the room. With the patient gasping for breath, he ordered Ritchie to fetch a heart monitor.

Moore seemed incredulous: Using a heart monitor would take valuable time. “We don’t need a heart monitor to check her lungs!” she exclaimed. It was rare for a nurse to defy a doctor, but the patient’s condition plainly suggested blood clots in the lungs. She needed to be rushed to another floor for testing.

Swango was insistent. “She has to have a heart monitor.”

“No she doesn’t!” Ritchie interjected, fearing that the patient would die while they delayed dealing with an obvious condition.

But Swango was adamant. Moore said she could handle the situation, and told the visibly upset Ritchie she could leave. Moore got the patient to the other floor in time to save her life.

After her shift ended that day, Ritchie was driving home on Route 315 to the northwest suburbs where she lived. She couldn’t get the day’s disturbing events out of her mind. Barrick’s death, Swango’s unfeeling reaction to it, and his jeopardizing another patient made her consider the possibility that his actions had been deliberate. Her heart started racing; her head felt light; and she feared she would faint. She pulled over to the side of the busy highway to collect herself, but she still felt waves of anxiety. As soon as she could, she got off the highway and drove to her sister’s house, where she broke down in tears. She told her sister about Ruth Barrick, and then about the other patient. Her sister called their father, the doctor, who said he’d check on Anne as soon as he could. Meanwhile, she did deep breathing exercises in an effort to stem the anxiety and calm herself. Surely she was wrong about Swango; Barrick’s death was an accident. Eventually her pulse returned to normal, she regained her strength, and she was able to drive home.

The next day, in line with the hospital protocol that any irregular incidents should be reported to one’s immediate superior, Ritchie told Amy Moore her suspicions that Swango had caused Barrick’s death. She also talked with several other nurses about what had happened. Given hospital practice, she didn’t dare say anything
to any doctors. And in any event, she was afraid to mention the real cause of her anxiety attack: her suspicion that Swango’s actions had been premeditated and deliberate.

T
HAT
same evening, February 7, Swango and several other doctors made their evening rounds, stopping to see Rena Cooper, a sixty-nine-year-old widow who had had an operation that morning for a lower back problem, and Iwonia Utz, age fifty-nine, who was scheduled for, but had not yet received, treatment for a brain tumor. For twelve days the two had shared Room 900 in Rhodes Hall; over that time, they had become friendly. Cooper, a former seamstress and, for nineteen years, a practical nurse, and Utz, also a widow, and the mother of nine children, had discovered that they shared a strong Christian faith. (Cooper described herself as “born again.”) On the evening of February 7, they had dinner, watched some television, and were avidly discussing the Bible when the doctors arrived. The doctors noted nothing unusual and continued their rounds. When they left, Cooper was lying comfortably on her side, with an intravenous tube for antibiotics connected to her left arm.

About an hour later, between nine and 9:15
P.M
., an Ohio State nursing student, Karolyn Tyrrell Beery, came in to Room 900 for a routine hourly check and was surprised to see Swango there. Cooper had requested more pain medication, asking Utz to hold the call button down for her because she couldn’t reach it, and Swango had apparently responded to the call. He was standing at Cooper’s bedside, only about three feet from Beery, and the student noticed that he was adding something to Cooper’s intravenous tube by inserting a syringe. “Her line must have clotted off” was her only thought; she assumed Swango was clearing a blockage. Beery stepped outside to enter data on Utz’s chart. She was running late, and ready to move on to her next patient when, no more than two minutes later, she heard Utz call out, “Are you all right, Mrs. Cooper?” Then Beery heard a violent rattling of bed rails, followed by Utz’s screams.

She rushed into the room. Utz cried out, “There’s something wrong!” Cooper was turning blue and had stopped breathing.

Panicked, Beery rushed to the nurses’ station for help, and returned to the room with a regular nurse, John Sigg. Sigg took one
look at Cooper, then called a code. Two doctors, Rees Freeman, the chief resident in neurosurgery, and Arlo Brakel, another resident, were among the first to arrive, along with several nurses.

The genial, easygoing Freeman was referred to by nurses as “California Boy,” since he’d grown up there. He was also a vitamin and mineral enthusiast, frequently handing out zinc tablets to patients, which the nurses also thought was a very West Coast habit. Brakel was often disheveled and tardy; as a joke, the nurses gave him an alarm clock with two large bells on top.

Swango, though he had just been in the room, didn’t immediately respond to the code. As the senior resident, Freeman took charge of the emergency. He asked Beery what had happened. “Doctor,” she said, “you know, Dr. Swango was in here and he left.”

“Dr. Swango was in here?” Freeman asked, somewhat incredulous, since the doctors’ rounds had been concluded some time earlier and Cooper wasn’t scheduled for any follow-up visits. “What was he doing here?”

“I don’t know,” Beery said, adding: “This doctor’s a real jerk.”

Freeman asked what medication Cooper had taken, and another nurse said it was only codeine, a mild pain remedy. Beery then remarked that she had seen Swango giving Cooper something through the intravenous tube, but the doctors seemed skeptical, and she was convinced that neither of them believed her, probably because she was just a student nurse. Their skepticism may also have been rooted in the hospital custom that nurses, not doctors, adjust IV tubes (as opposed to the more complicated central lines). While doctors may inject drugs directly into IV lines, Cooper hadn’t been scheduled for any such medication.

With the code and all the commotion in her room, Utz had become hysterical—by her own account, she was “screaming like mad”—and Freeman ordered her removed. As nurses converged on Utz, she called out that “a doctor with blond hair did something to Mrs. Cooper.” Between sobs, she elaborated to the nurses: the “blond-haired doctor” had come into the room with a syringe and “something yellow that you wrap on your arm when you draw blood.” She had heard him tell Cooper that “he was going to give her something to make her feel better.” Utz said she had watched as the doctor wrapped the yellow tube around Cooper’s arm, injected
her with the syringe, and then “ran” from the room. Then Cooper’s bed rails began to shake. Utz tried to press her emergency call button, but couldn’t reach it, so she began screaming for attention. By the time Utz had finished her story, she had been moved to a private room down the hall, so only nurses heard the full account.

In any event, the doctors at this point were more concerned about saving Cooper than they were about determining the cause of her mysterious paralysis. Brakel later noted that Cooper “was not breathing. She was unconscious. She had no movements to any stimulus, even deep pain.” But she wasn’t dead—she had a good pulse and heartbeat. The doctors checked her pupils and noticed that there was faint, sluggish reaction to stimuli. But the doctors were surprised by what they called her “total flaccidity”—“she didn’t even have any reflexes,” as Brakel put it. The doctors inserted a tube down her throat to facilitate breathing. This is normally a painful procedure, but Cooper showed no reaction, and the doctors concluded she was essentially paralyzed.

Joe Risley, a nurse’s aide, had responded to the code, and was standing outside Cooper’s room when he heard Beery, who was a friend of his, tell Freeman that Swango had injected something into Cooper’s IV. He moved west down the corridor and rounded a corner, checking to make sure there were no other patient emergencies while the medical staff was preoccupied with Cooper. As he neared Room 966, Risley saw Swango, wearing his white medical coat, come out the door. Risley knew Swango had just been in Cooper’s room, and knew of no reason he would be in 966. But what really struck him was a peculiar look of satisfaction on Swango’s face when he looked Risley directly in the eye. As Risley later put it, “He had a goofy look on his face  . . . . It’s an old cliché, like a kid with his fingers in the cookie jar. I mean, it was basically just a shit-eating grin.”

The two said nothing to each other as they passed, but Risley, his suspicions aroused, immediately went into the room. On the bathroom sink, located just inside the door, were an 18-gauge needle and a 10cc syringe with the plunger depressed. An 18-gauge needle is large, used on patients only in unusual circumstances when a large dosage needs to be injected at high speed. Lily Jordan, the charge nurse, who supervised other nurses on the floor, was walking by, and
Risley asked her if anyone had been assigned to give an injection in Room 966. No, she replied, not that she knew of. Risley asked her to look in the bathroom, and pointed out the huge needle and syringe. “Did you leave that there?”

“No,” she said emphatically.

“I just found it,” Risley said.

The two thought the location of the abandoned syringe was peculiar, since a sharps container—a box for disposing of used needles and syringes—was located just behind the sink.

Risley told Jordan that he’d just seen Swango coming out of the room with a strange look on his face, and the significance of their discovery immediately sank in. Jordan took a paper towel, wrapped it around the syringe and needle, and carefully placed them in a cabinet under the sink.

“You are my witness,” she told Risley, who nodded gravely.

B
ACK
in Room 900, Cooper was responding to resuscitation efforts. Within fifteen minutes she was breathing on her own, and the paralysis throughout the rest of her body quickly eased. Though the tube down her throat prevented her from speaking, she indicated with gestures that she wanted to write a note. The supervising nurse on the floor that evening, Sharon Black, fetched a notebook and pencil and handed them to her. Cooper scrawled, “He put something in my IV.” Black took the note, dated it “February 7, 1984,” and wrote Cooper’s name and patient number on it. Cooper was immediately removed to the intensive care unit, where she again asked for pencil and paper. This time she wrote, “Someone gave me some med in my IV and paralyzed all of me, lungs, heart, speech” and “someone gave me an injection in my IV and it paralyzed my lungs and heart.”

As soon as the tube was removed and Cooper could speak, Dr. Freeman asked her what had happened. She reiterated that a blond-haired person had injected something into her IV; she had seen a syringe in the person’s hand. She had never gotten a clear look at this person’s face. As soon as he gave her the injection, she felt a “blackness” spread through her body, beginning in the left arm attached to the IV, then spreading from the left to the right side of her body. She became frightened when she tried to speak and couldn’t, and
with her dwindling strength began shaking the bed rails to attract attention. Then, she said, she saw a “white angel of death” at her bedside and stopped breathing.