![]() They would drive Alan back home to McAllen and get psychiatric help there. Pean and his wife figured, OK, no help here. He said the nurse said to him- maybe hearing his accent- you might be a doctor somewhere, but you're not a doctor here. His father booked a plane to Houston from their home in McAllen, Texas. Alan's put into a hospital room for observation of his injuries. Alan and his family told me, their sense of the staff's attitude was, this is just a guy, drunk or on drugs, crashed his car. He starts telling the staff that he feels all better, no need for any equipment.īut they still don't treat him like a psychiatric case. They, quote, "educate him on his behavior and ask him not to remove any equipment." By 1:30 in the morning, the nurses' notes say that Alan is acting weirdly, trying to pull out his IVs and his lines. Then Alan is so incoherent, making so little sense, that the attending physician notes in the chart that he can't get Alan to describe his medical history or even a basic rundown of his symptoms. On Alan's arrival at the ER, the first handwritten notes from a resident on duty include that Alan is someone who has manic depression. And there's no mention of phone calls that his brother Christian and his father say they made at 1:00 AM and 1:14 AM, respectively, to alert the hospital about Alan's psychiatric issues- though that's not unusual that phone calls like that wouldn't be mentioned in the chart.īut the medical records do include all kinds of things that could have tipped the staff off about what was really wrong. ![]() ![]() There's no mention of that in his medical records. Alan says that he tried to tell the ER staff what it is that he came for, that he was having a manic episode. Those come up negative, except for marijuana, which can linger in the body for weeks. They do a CT scan of his head, spine, chest, abdomen, and pelvis, looking for injuries. The diagnosis in his medical chart is hand abrasion, substance abuse, motor vehicle accident. What they treat Alan for is the car crash, which must have seemed pretty urgent. Staff often have to quickly assess what a patient needs to be treated for.Īnd even though the staff notices all kinds of things that might lead them to treat Alan for his psychiatric problem, they don't do it. It gets lots of trauma patients, lots of mentally ill patients, some homeless people. And there's a 50-page report, prepared by federal investigators, of what happened from the time Alan arrived at the hospital until he was shot.Īlan gets to the emergency room at 10 minutes before midnight. He gave permission for the hospital to turn them over. There's documentation of what he looked like from the outside to people who were not in his head, people who did not think that he was a robot cyborg on a secret mission. And from this point in the story, for the 11 hours before the shooting, we don't have to rely on Alan's recollection. This is where this turns from one kind of story, a story of Alan losing control of his mind, to the other story we're telling here, of how you can show up in an emergency room needing psychiatric help and end up shot by the police in the hospital. They put Alan on a stretcher, take him into the ER. The EMT sees that Alan just crashed his car and probably needs medical attention. Today's program, "My Damn Mind." We have two stories on our program today- in one, the brain working for you, and the other, this story, the brain very much not working for you, not being a helper, not being a pal. It's This American Life from WBEZ Chicago. And he describes what that feels like in this way I have never heard anybody describe before. Bit by bit, he stopped understanding what was real and what wasn't real. He's alive and talking about what happened.Īnd when he does, before you get to the very interesting story about how he ended up with a bullet in his chest, it's also incredibly interesting to hear him describe the day that led up to the shooting, because during that day, over the course of just a few hours, basically his mind slipped away from him. To explain what happened in that hospital room, I want to back up to the day before, 20 hours before the shooting, and tell you about the patient. The actor, by the way, is named Scott Shepherd. The story I'm about to tell you is one that we put together in collaboration with The New York Times, last year. It was so contentious that I recorded an interview with this hospital staffer, and to protect their identity, we have replaced the person's voice with an actor saying the exact same words. The fallout from this incident was enormous. Police had shot an unarmed patient in his own hospital room.
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