Dead Within 12 Weeks of Starting Heparin

Louis, MSJudith's husband, John, had been ill with pneumonia for several weeks when he was admitted to hospital, for the last time, in March. The doctors put him on continuous intravenous heparin, in addition to drugs to treat his pneumonia. Judith watched her husband worsen, until he died in late April. She is convinced that the heparin was tainted and likely killed him.

Judith's husband actually began heparin injections when he was initially hospitalized in February for pneumonia. When he was released from hospital, Judith continued to administer the pre-filled heparin to her husband for the next few weeks, as instructed by their doctors. But her husband seemed to be getting worse not better. "He became swollen, he lost his appetite, and he perspired a lot. I had difficulty getting him to go to the bathroom. He was confined to bed," Judith said. "He was just 69 years old. He had no underlying health conditions apart from a stiff right leg, which he had had for years."

On April 7th John was scheduled to return to the hospital for a follow-up visit. "We took him up there, and the doctor said if we'd been another 10 minutes John would have been dead in the back of my van," Judith said. "So, they put him back in the hospital, he was in the intensive care unit for about two weeks. The doctors started continuous administration of heparin."

Both Judith and the doctors were at a loss for an explanation as to the cause of his worsening health. "While he was in the hospital his blood pressure dropped, and he had heart attack. But this was not my husband," Judith said. "We've been married 36 years - going on 37, I knew everything about him. He's been through many operations as a result of his leg, but this was amazing to me. The doctors kept saying they couldn't get the fluid off his lungs. They gave him blood. They said they did every test in the book to try and find out what was going on. They even tested him for HIV."

Then, on April 22 John died. "Last week we took his ashes down to the national cemetery in Little Rock and buried him," Judith said. "My daughter and my grandchildren all went."

While it's too late for an autopsy, it's not too late for Judith and her family to seek legal advice. "We didn't do an autopsy because we didn't think anything of it at the time. But I recently saw a commercial on TV about the potentially lethal effects of heparin. I told my niece about it and she looked it up on the Internet. So I got in touch with the lawyers," she said.

Now Judith wants to get her husband's medical records. And to her credit, she still has the empty heparin packages with the lot numbers on them. These are important and should be kept. "I held on to them. I'm going to make sure that something comes of all this. I really think that this is wrong," she said. "I don't think my husband should have died. He had pneumonia before and recovered from it. I think it was the heparin what really killed him. He just started going down hill from the time he began taking it."