My experience at Johns Hopkins Baltimore:

I took my wife there last year for a Pulmonary Vein Ablation to treat her arryhtmia. The procedure involves manuevering a catheter through a vein and up inside the heart chamber.

While the tip of the catheter was inside her heart, the doctor turned away momentarily and the tip of the catheter got caught in the muscles of her mitral valve. Another doctor was called in to help. He pulled on the catheter and severed her mitral valve muscles. Open-heart surgery was performed to replace the valve.

In recovery, she was taken off the ventilator prematurely, resulting in Acute Congestive Heart Failure and had to be put back on life support. She ran a fever, had a stroke and went into a coma. She spent three weeks in the ICU. During that time, she suffered eye damage because her eyes were not lubricated or covered - despite suggestions from family - at a time when she had no blink reflex. The result was scratched corneas from a syndrome called Exposure Keratopathy, something the eye experts at the Wilmer Institute later shrugged off as being something they "see a lot of" in the ICU. She now has nerve damage in her right hand from either the stroke or improper bed restraint methods.

I firmly believe that if her family were not there to insist on proper care, that she would be either dead or the next thing to it in some long-term nursing facility. As it is, she has loss of equilibrium, short-term memory deficits and general cognitive problems.

Before her stay at Hopkins, she was a relatively healthy Registered Nurse and entrepreneur who ran two businesses. Post-Hopkins she can neither run a busines nor practice nursing and has been officially classified as being disabled by the Social Security Administration.

Hopkins reaction: Tough Luck.
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