My son was negligently treated by Glen Innes hospital on the 31.10.2017.
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I would hope that no family would ever have to experience the turmoil such negligence can do to a family.
For 20 years, I have raised my three sons, after their father died from a heart attack twenty years ago. The date of his death was the beginning of a family nightmare.
A family that both he and I hoped we would raise to be upstanding caring citizens of the community.
My youngest son, was an intelligent young man, he was always in the top of his classes, be it physics, engineering etc. In Year 11 depression begun to take hold of him.
School systems and minimal support, dragged him down to the point, where he fell from the town bridge, fracturing his back in five places and shattering his wrist.
READ MORE: NSW budget offers help for mental health
A young man that endured pain from such a young age, suffering a debilitating disease of perthes in his his hips. On huge doses of narcotics to manage his pain.
Huge doses of ibuprofen, in which now at age 22, if he takes them he gets blood in his stools… other medications given that basically made him feel like a zombie.
So in October 2017, as he finished a private job working for my business, he experienced his first epileptic clonic tonic seizure.
The person who was driving him home had never witnessed something so violent, thankfully this lady turned her car around and got him to hospital. But was it really thankfully, after what happened next?
The lady assumes it’s a drug overdose, therefore he is treated as such. “A drug overdose”.
As he wakes from his first ever seizure, he is totally disoriented and begins to get up to walk out and go home.
He was not being medically supervised.
At this time, he then had another seizure, hitting his head on the ground and sustaining contusions.
How did the hospital manage this?
Physically restraining him, getting police to attend and assist in physically restraining him, whilst they investigate his head injury...
When myself and his partner arrived at Glen Innes, I can hear my son screaming out, to let him go home.
I’m banging on the door, trying to let them know he had been having absent seizures leading up to this for a few months and in no way was it a drug overdose.
They than chemically restrained my son, intubated him and arranged the Westpac Helicopter to have him transferred to Tamworth, not to investigate the seizures but to investigate the head injury, caused by their negligence…
In two hours, the only people that came to speak to me or his partner, were two police officers, asking me where he would have got the drugs from and admin checking details.
Even in the 6 hours of being there, watching over my son, the staff neglected to notice the drugs they fed him to keep him in an induced coma, were not holding him.
The second occasion he woke and pulled the tube out of his throat.
In May 18, we were finally able to get him into a neurologist in Brisbane.
In July, he was diagnosed with epilepsy since childbirth. For a young man that had so much potential, health care has destroyed any hope for him.
I’ve endeavoured to get my son the help he needs.
He has a great mental health worker, he has a GP willing to work with the specialists and help him sort out the nightmare he lives.
However, every system in this “fair country” does not and will not support an average white Australian.
I say this not because I’m racist but because the flaws of the systems will not support my family however, if I had of agreed to signing up as aboriginal, we may not have fallen through these cracks, that have destroyed our family.
My sons deserve a fair and just society. They deserve to be heard. They deserve to be cared for.
A very saddened mother, very fearful for what will happen to my son!!!
Name withheld