XPost: wny.news, sac.politics, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh
XPost: misc.survivalism
From: psycho@salon.com

Tammy Cleveland feared the worst when she arrived to DeGraff
Memorial Hospital on the night of Oct. 10, 2014.

Minutes earlier, her husband, Michael, had collapsed in a
supermarket in a suburb of Buffalo. Witnesses and paramedics had
performed CPR, but Michael had been rushed to the emergency room
in serious condition.

Tammy was sitting in a hospital waiting room with her daughter
and stepson when a young doctor named Gregory C. Perry delivered
the bad news. He had worked on Michael for an hour but her
husband’s heart had refused to restart, Perry allegedly told
them.

Michael was dead, the doctor said.

But when Tammy and the children were allowed to see the
supposedly dead man, what they saw startled them.

Michael was moving.

“I immediately noticed that Michael’s eyes turned to me,” Tammy
told The Washington Post in a phone interview. “He was alive.”

When Tammy told Perry, however, she says the doctor didn’t
believe her. For more than two and a half hours, she begged the
physician, nurses and even a coroner to re-examine her husband —
but nobody did, Tammy claims.

When Perry finally agreed to check Michael’s vital signs, he
felt a heartbeat.

“My God, he’s got a pulse,” the doctor said, according to Tammy.

The story of how Michael seemingly “came back from the dead” is
a strange and ultimately tragic tale of missed opportunities and
alleged medical negligence. For the Cleveland family, it has
been a nightmare. For countless others, it has conjured up
distrust of doctors and captured dark fears of being fatally
misdiagnosed by a physician.

And now it’s the subject of a lawsuit.

Tammy is suing Perry, another doctor and two hospitals in New
York state court over claims that they “negligently, carelessly
and recklessly treated” Michael.

“He didn’t take the time for me at all,” she said of Perry. “He
just told me that my husband passed. He couldn’t just come in
there and show that he was dead. He couldn’t take a second and
put a stethoscope on him and prove to me that he wasn’t
breathing.

I don’t understand that. Why wouldn’t you do that to appease a
grieving widow at that time, instead of walking in there
nonchalant and give me your two cents acting like I was crazy?”

Brian Sutter, an attorney representing Perry, declined to
comment on the case “due to privacy concerns.” Sutter did add,
however, that “Dr. Perry is a caring physician, and as the facts
of this case are fully developed, I am confident it will be
established that his actions were appropriate.”

The company that runs the two hospitals declined to comment to
local media. A lawyer representing the other doctor in the case
said he stood by the physician’s treatment and intended to
“vigorously defend the case,” according to the Buffalo News.

Tammy Cleveland’s nightmare began around 8 p.m. on Oct. 10,
2014, when she received a call from Michael’s ex-wife saying he
had collapsed at a Tops supermarket in Tonawanda, N.Y.

Michael, 46, was a tall and handsome telemarketer. He and Tammy
had met in 2001 at work in Endicott, N.Y. She was roughly a foot
shorter and a few years older, but they had fallen in love and
moved to Amherst, a suburb of Buffalo, in 2005.

When Michael collapsed last year, the couple was just a few days
away from moving again to a bigger house near a golf course.

“We just bought new clubs,” Tammy tearfully told The Post.

As Perry told Tammy that her husband was dead, she felt her
future falling apart.

But her sorrow started to turn into confusion, then anger, when
she and her daughter were allowed to see Michael. Tammy thought
it was strange that Michael had supposedly just died, and yet he
wasn’t hooked up to oxygen or life support.

Then she saw Michael move.

When she told the doctor and a nurse what she had seen, however,
they “advised that it looked like [Michael] was breathing and
that it was normal because he was expelling what was left in his
young body,” according to the lawsuit. “Perry and the nurse
assured them that [Michael]’s heart had stopped, that he was not
alive but he may expel air and that was normal.”

When Perry and the nurse left the room, however, Michael “turned
his eyes and looked at [Tammy] as she spoke to him,” according
to the lawsuit.

Tammy jumped back in shock. She called Perry and the nurse back
in but they “did not touch [Michael] or check his vitals but
told the family members this was normal and they again left the
room,” according to the lawsuit.

When Tammy kept speaking to her husband, he “responded by
turning his eyes towards [her], moving his head side to side,
looking at [her] and moving his legs,” the complaint continues.

Again, Tammy called in Perry and the nurse. And again, they told
her that her husband was dead. For more than two hours, the
process repeated itself, with Tammy increasingly convinced that
her husband was alive and trying to communicate with her, while
his doctors and nurses insisted he was dead, she said.

“Throughout the night, Michael was doing more and more, and
asking for help,” Tammy told The Post. She tried telling Perry
and the nurse a third time but was similarly rebuffed, she said.

“I knew he was alive but a part of me felt like maybe I didn’t
know that I was talking about,” Tammy said. “I don’t have a
medical degree but I knew he was alive and I wanted somebody to
believe me.”

She reached her breaking point when the coroner arrived to take
Michael away for an autopsy.

“The coroner came in and I just yelled at him: ‘Are you here to
prove that my husband is dead? Because he’s not. Look at him,'”
Tammy recalled. When Michael’s arm, leg and mouth moved, the
coroner “looked at him and walked out” to get the doctor, she
said.

“I said: My god. If the doctor doesn’t prove that Mike’s either
dead or alive he’s going to be laying there with him,” Tammy
told The Post.

Finally, at 11:10 p.m., Perry entered the room for a fifth time
and agreed to check Michael’s vital signs. More than two hours
after he declared Michael dead, Perry now felt a heartbeat.

“My God, he’s got a pulse,” the doctor said, Tammy recalls.

“No s—,” she replied.

Tammy’s account is backed up by her brother and father, who
arrived at the hospital roughly two hours after she did.

“It was very obvious to us when we walked in the room,” her
brother, Peter Ferrera, told The Post. “We both walked in the
room expecting to console Tammy [because] Mike had passed. We
walked in and looked at each other and were stunned because it
was obvious to us that he was still breathing. There was
condensation in the [breathing] tube. We were just shocked.”

“We asked Tammy what was going on and she indicated that she had
tried several times to get someone to look at him but nobody
would,” Ferrera added.

When Perry finally felt Michael’s pulse, “all hell broke loose.”


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