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Oxygen-dependent California man dies 12 minutes after PG&E cuts power to his home

I know for a fact that if you rely on electric power for medical equipment, like a hospital bed that relies on an air cushion, an electric lift to pick a patient up out of bed, an oxygen generator or ventilator, even a power wheelchair, if it is the patient's only means of getting about...if you are dependent upon that power and you're a 100% service connected disabled vet, the VA will pay the cost of installing emergency backup generating equipment.
Your VA doctor will deem it as medically necessary durable medical equipment and they will write a "prescription" and you will get your gennie.

I am not sure if Medicare has similar provisions or not, but they might.
 
HumblePi said:
Your post had an intention and the inference was clear, it was to blame PG&E for this man's death. The thread title is written in a way to influence people to believe it as if it were fact, it's not.
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Well as I have defended the power outage and the interruption in this man's supplemental O2 supply wasn't a good thing and MAY have contributed to his death. But as I SAID in the OP it may have been coincidence. I can't help your preconceived bias. I presented my comment in a neutral fashion. THEN you began an argument that you obviously knew little about and gave people bad information. I proved you wrong so now lick your wounds and admit you were wrong. Or do you want to discuss hypecapneia and its effect on the brain and the oxyhemoglobin disassociation curve and its relationship with SAO2.
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
I know for a fact that if you rely on electric power for medical equipment, like a hospital bed that relies on an air cushion, an electric lift to pick a patient up out of bed, an oxygen generator or ventilator, even a power wheelchair, if it is the patient's only means of getting about...if you are dependent upon that power and you're a 100% service connected disabled vet, the VA will pay the cost of installing emergency backup generating equipment.
Your VA doctor will deem it as medically necessary durable medical equipment and they will write a "prescription" and you will get your gennie.

I am not sure if Medicare has similar provisions or not, but they might.
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That is very good information to know.

BTW that video was inspiring! Thanks for posting it!
 
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LowDown said:
That's life in a third world country.
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Yeah, a lot of Americans seem determined to head in that direction. Lucky for them, they already have the right POTUS.
 
SLC said:
Well as I have defended the power outage and the interruption in this man's supplemental O2 supply wasn't a good thing and MAY have contributed to his death. But as I SAID in the OP it may have been coincidence. I can't help your preconceived bias. I presented my comment in a neutral fashion. THEN you began an argument that you obviously knew little about and gave people bad information. I proved you wrong so now lick your wounds and admit you were wrong. Or do you want to discuss hypecapneia and its effect on the brain and the oxyhemoglobin disassociation curve and its relationship with SAO2.
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Why is this even a thread then? You didn't prove me wrong at all, only in your own mind.
 
HumblePi said:
Why is this even a thread then? You didn't prove me wrong at all, only in your own mind.
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Huh! You would be doing CPR on a person with a heart attack even if they were not in cardiac arrest. Rookie mistake . :lol: Then after I caught you when you wanted to take their pulse and give them an Aspirin but didn't mention giving them O2. You just failed your ACLS test . :lol: You displayed your lack of understanding of the need for supplemental oxygen in people with severe atherosclerosis heart disease and with concomitant diseases like COPD like this man had. You tried to pretend you had superior knowledge because you are a nurse but you information was wrong. :lol:
 
JustHanging said:
Yeah, a lot of Americans seem determined to head in that direction. Lucky for them, they already have the right POTUS.
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This happened in the People Republic Of California. It's their fault not Trump's.
 
SLC said:
That is very good information to know.

BTW that video was inspiring! Thanks for posting it!
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The cute skinny brunette in the racing cheer is my wife.
She's the veteran, I'm the six foot growth attached to the veteran.

So you were there when it was still more of a clinic, just like Stephen Ray said in the video.
He mentioned Ben Rosenman and a few others, including some of the old doctors, I think.
Dallas VA definitely grew and improved a good deal under the Anthony Principi regime.
I don't care that he was a G.W. Bush pick and a Republican.
He was an excellent SecVA, in my humble opinion.
 
SLC said:
And what is one of the first treatments for a heart attack?
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Couple of quick slaps followed by, "Hey buddy! Snap out of it!. Somebody give me a pill. What kinda pill is this, man?"

"Dude, I dunno. It's a pill. It was in my pocket. You just said pill, man. Didn't say what kind."

Yeah, stupid, but it is California, after all.
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
The cute skinny brunette in the racing cheer is my wife.
She's the veteran, I'm the six foot growth attached to the veteran.

So you were there when it was still more of a clinic, just like Stephen Ray said in the video.
He mentioned Ben Rosenman and a few others, including some of the old doctors, I think.
Dallas VA definitely grew and improved a good deal under the Anthony Principi regime.
I don't care that he was a G.W. Bush pick and a Republican.
He was an excellent SecVA, in my humble opinion.
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After I left I didn't really have time to keep up with the VA. Med school and residency consumed all my time. When I was there patients got good care in the ICU's but on the floors/wards not so much. It was a 1000 bed hospital at the time. I worked in TICU (Heart surgeries) 5 years and Special Procedures Lab (Right heart caths, pacemakers, and electro physiology) 5 years.
 
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SLC said:
After I left I didn't really have time to keep up with the VA. Med school and residency consumed all my time. When I was there patients got good care in the ICU's but on the floors/wards not so much. It was a 1000 bed hospital at the time. I worked in TICU (Heart surgeries) 5 years and Special Procedures Lab (Right heart caths, pacemakers, and electro physiology) 5 years.
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Wife has had several very complex kidney surgeries there but never wound up in ICU for more than a day tops.
Her stays in Dallas and here in Long Beach = 5 BIG stars every single time.
Dallas saved her life four times and Long Beach has saved her life three times. Same stuff, kidney and bladder.
And she had two bad setbacks back to back, a broken leg followed by a four month ordeal with an icheal pressure sore due to the stress of wearing the Long Beach Splint.
Her recent two month stay at VA Long Beach made her climb the walls but not due to the way she was treated...it was the severity of the pressure sore and the recovery process, which was a month immobilized in a Clinitron bed.
The sore developed right where the top of her femur meets the pelvis, right where one sits down.

But the staff at both Dallas and Long Beach have treated her like a rock star.
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
Wife has had several very complex kidney surgeries there but never wound up in ICU for more than a day tops.
Her stays in Dallas and here in Long Beach = 5 BIG stars every single time.
Dallas saved her life four times and Long Beach has saved her life three times. Same stuff, kidney and bladder.
And she had two bad setbacks back to back, a broken leg followed by a four month ordeal with an icheal pressure sore due to the stress of wearing the Long Beach Splint.
Her recent two month stay at VA Long Beach made her climb the walls but not due to the way she was treated...it was the severity of the pressure sore and the recovery process, which was a month immobilized in a Clinitron bed.
The sore developed right where the top of her femur meets the pelvis, right where one sits down.

But the staff at both Dallas and Long Beach have treated her like a rock star.
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Good to hear she was treated well she deserves it. I hope the floors at the VA have improved at the time I was at the VA they were grossly understaffed IMHO. Pressure sores are terrible. I did some training at Craig Rehabilitation hospital in Denver. They are famous for their work with spinal cord and brain injuries. Pressure sores are terrible.
 
SLC said:
Good to hear she was treated well she deserves it. I hope the floors at the VA have improved at the time I was at the VA they were grossly understaffed IMHO. Pressure sores are terrible. I did some training at Craig Rehabilitation hospital in Denver. They are famous for their work with spinal cord and brain injuries. Pressure sores are terrible.
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I'm here to say that the VA has improved tremendously in the last fifteen or so years.
Wife's tushy is all healed up now, you can barely tell there was even any surgery.
The doctor even joked about how he wasn't about to earn the scorn of a pretty lady for leaving big ugly scars
The guy wasn't joking, he did excellent work.

VA still suffers from some bureaucratic nightmares, and the improvement isn't consistent from state to state either...there are still a handful of what I would term "incorrigible" or "hopeless" VA facilities, and maybe the VA just needs to give up, tear them down and dispatch everyone in those areas to the private sector.

The Memphis VA comes to mind as an example of a VA which has not responded to efforts to improve.
It's clearly a case of ingrained hard-baked toxic culture because one of the main problems is staff turnover, which apparently affects all levels and positions over there. They can't keep doctors or other staff very long.
It is that way today and it was the same way back in the late 1990's when Karen and I were trying to deal with them.
It wasn't unsanitary or scary in other ways, she just never saw the same people three months in, three months out.
It seems that they had new people every few months and they would just start Karen over, again and again.

But most of the VA's have improved a lot.
Perhaps merging with the DoD healthcare system might be an excellent idea.
There really is no need to have the two services entirely separate anyway.
Too much duplication.
 
SLC said:
Oxygen-dependent California man dies 12 minutes after PG&E cuts power to his home | Fox News

A Northern California man dependent on an oxygen supply died Wednesday, shortly after power cuts by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. affected his home, fire officials said Friday.

Robert Mardis, 67, died roughly 12 minutes after PG&E cut power to his home and the surrounding area. An autopsy report concluded the man died of severe coronary artery atherosclerosis, according to the Sacramento Bee.

Fire personnel responded to a call around 3:40 a.m. and found Mardis unresponsive on the floor of his home, according to El Dorado County Interim Fire Chief Lloyd Ogan. He was found wearing a nasal cannula, used to deliver oxygen to the nose, and was hooked up to a PPAP machine for that purpose. Mardis' family told Fox 40 he couldn’t reach his battery-powered tank in time.

California’s largest utility company instituted blackouts for its customers beginning Wednesday to prevent high winds from toppling power lines, which could cause deadly wildfires such as last year's Camp Fire, which left 85 people dead and was attributed to PG&E equipment.

Frustrations ran high as around 700,000 customers went without power. Experts say the actual number of people affected amounts to almost 2 million California residents. About half of those who lost power in the San Francisco Bay Area had it back by Friday.

For most it was a major inconvenience, but for Mardis, it may have had a deadly unintended consequence. PG&E spokeswoman Brandi Merlo said Friday that the company did not have any details about the death and had not substantiated it. But California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has been critical of the service provider’s actions, called the death “devastating beyond words.”

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When they said the power would be cut I was concerned about people with medical conditions that were dependent on power. This may just be coincidence but cutting off an oxygen concentrator to a supplemental oxygen dependent person is very dangerous. I wonder what the people on home dialysis or home ventilators did?
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Yeah right. If you were truly concerned about people with preexisting conditions. Such as this unfortunate gentleman apparently suffered from. Because if you did you wouldn't be supporting a President, a Party, and a DOJ led by a politically biased AG. Whom are all actively supporting lawsuits that take would take away the ACA's coverage of people with preexisting conditions, while at the same time not offering any viable, affordable or better alternative.
 
Atomic Kid said:
Yeah right. If you were truly concerned about people with preexisting conditions. Such as this unfortunate gentleman apparently suffered from. Because if you did you wouldn't be supporting a President, a Party, and a DOJ led by a politically biased AG. Whom are all actively supporting lawsuits that take would take away the ACA's coverage of people with preexisting conditions, while at the same time not offering any viable, affordable or better alternative.
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Blah Blah Blah. This man had home oxygen it was the power being cut off that interrupted his O2 not the repeal of ACA.
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
I'm here to say that the VA has improved tremendously in the last fifteen or so years.
Wife's tushy is all healed up now, you can barely tell there was even any surgery.
The doctor even joked about how he wasn't about to earn the scorn of a pretty lady for leaving big ugly scars
The guy wasn't joking, he did excellent work.

VA still suffers from some bureaucratic nightmares, and the improvement isn't consistent from state to state either...there are still a handful of what I would term "incorrigible" or "hopeless" VA facilities, and maybe the VA just needs to give up, tear them down and dispatch everyone in those areas to the private sector.

The Memphis VA comes to mind as an example of a VA which has not responded to efforts to improve.
It's clearly a case of ingrained hard-baked toxic culture because one of the main problems is staff turnover, which apparently affects all levels and positions over there. They can't keep doctors or other staff very long.
It is that way today and it was the same way back in the late 1990's when Karen and I were trying to deal with them.
It wasn't unsanitary or scary in other ways, she just never saw the same people three months in, three months out.
It seems that they had new people every few months and they would just start Karen over, again and again.

But most of the VA's have improved a lot.
Perhaps merging with the DoD healthcare system might be an excellent idea.
There really is no need to have the two services entirely separate anyway.
Too much duplication.
Click to expand...
VA is getting better. I could tell you some wild stories about the Dallas VS. Like the time a 90 pound nurse I worked with that crawled out the window to rescue a 300# confused man in a diaper roaming the 5th floor roof looking for his truck. :shock: She said she wasn't scared until she got back inside the inside the building. The guy could have easily tossed her off the roof.
 
SLC said:
VA is getting better. I could tell you some wild stories about the Dallas VS. Like the time a 90 pound nurse I worked with that crawled out the window to rescue a 300# confused man in a diaper roaming the 5th floor roof looking for his truck. :shock: She said she wasn't scared until she got back inside the inside the building. The guy could have easily tossed her off the roof.
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But that's the "fifth floor" of a lot of hospitals, truth be told.
I'm sure you have some hellacious stories. :lamo

UCLA has NPI, the Neuro-Psychiatric Institute. Same sort of deal when I worked as an electronics maintenance tech back in the 80's. I think our most special customers were on the 7th floor if my memory serves me right.
First month as a newbie I carelessly left a screwdriver on my cart and a guy went after me with it.
Tsk tsk tsk...ya gotta lock up all your sharps on the 7th floor.
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
But that's the "fifth floor" of a lot of hospitals, truth be told.
I'm sure you have some hellacious stories. :lamo

UCLA has NPI, the Neuro-Psychiatric Institute. Same sort of deal when I worked as an electronics maintenance tech back in the 80's. I think our most special customers were on the 7th floor if my memory serves me right.
First month as a newbie I carelessly left a screwdriver on my cart and a guy went after me with it.
Tsk tsk tsk...ya gotta lock up all your sharps on the 7th floor.
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In Dallas they had a psychiatric patient standing in the pharmacy line for meds and he became agitated at the guy in front of him and stabbed him in the heart. Clearly his psychiatric meds were not working . They rushed the victim to surgery but could not save him. well. Working in TICU we prepared a bed for the victim but he never made it out of surgery.
 
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SLC said:
Blah Blah Blah. This man had home oxygen it was the power being cut off that interrupted his O2 not the repeal of ACA.
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Blah, Blah, Blah. My ass! The power being cutoff wasn't the point. The point is your is crocodile tears for a man whose precondition may shortly be no longer covered by the ACA thanks to the President's, the GOP's, and the DOJ's efforts to dismantle it and take away their health insurance coverage. How many people do you think could possibly die as a result if their efforts are successful? Isn't that kind of like a Washington DC equivalent of 'turning the lights off' on them?
 
Atomic Kid said:
Blah, Blah, Blah. My ass! The power being cutoff wasn't the point. The point is your is crocodile tears for a man whose precondition may shortly be no longer covered by the ACA thanks to the President's, the GOP's, and the DOJ's efforts to dismantle it and take away their health insurance coverage. How many people do you think could possibly die as a result if their efforts are successful? Isn't that kind of like a Washington DC equivalent of 'turning the lights off' on them?
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Blah Blah Blah. Trump's policies didn't cause the power company to shut off the power to this oxygen dependent patient. The policies of California and the power company are the only ones at fault.
 
SLC said:
You don't really have a clue do you.
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They never do. He senses that you're implicitly criticizing the party that controls California, and goes straight into attack mode.
 
AmNat said:
They never do. He senses that you're implicitly criticizing the party that controls California, and goes straight into attack mode.
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Yeah someone hear made the argument that PG&E purposely strung their lines loose on purpose and loose lines are more likely to arc and cause fires. That does not seem like a fault of California. Poor management of the under brush may be a California issue how ever.
 
JustHanging said:
Yeah, a lot of Americans seem determined to head in that direction. Lucky for them, they already have the right POTUS.
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Nope. Trump's opponents are far more dangerous in that regard than he is.
 
mike2810 said:
Can you say for sure that he would not have died with the O2 still working?
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Of course not, but the association between his death and the power being cut is telling.
 
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