From the Houston Chronicle:
An Auburn, Wash., woman accused of doing nothing while maggots gnawed at her elderly mother now faces a felony elder-abuse charge.
King County prosecutors in Seattle claim Sherrie Morton, 46, left her 70-year-old mother to rot at the Southeast 315th Street home they shared. The older woman would most likely have died there, had medics and King County Sheriff’s Office deputies not rescued her earlier this month.
Deputies and medics arrived to find the older woman stuck to her bedding. According to charging papers, a deputy looking into the bedroom window saw maggots crawling in a large open wound on the woman’s leg; the bed sheets were soiled with the byproducts of injury and covered in bugs.
As deputies entered the home, Morton emerged from a rear bedroom. According to charging papers, Morton said she’d been living at the home for 13 years and claimed her mother’s injury was only a few days old.
Paramedics came to a different conclusion: The woman had been injured at least a month before, and the septic, gangrenous wound could have taken her leg.
“The maggots may have helped keep (the woman) alive due to the fact that they were eating the rotting skin that was infected and helping to slow the infection,” King County Sheriff's Det. Marylisa Priebe-Olson said in court papers, recounting a statement from a paramedic.
Firefighters and medics dressed in hazardous-material suits pulled the woman from her home and transported her to Valley Medical Center, where she was in critical condition. Medical staff removed hundreds of maggots from her body in the days following her rescue. http://www.chron.com/local/article/Police-Maggots-may-have-kept-rotting-Auburn-4624559.php
As a former EMT, I've run across some bad scenes, but not like that.
And this is why I don't complain about the pay about first responders who work in the field.
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I will bnever understand how someone can treat their own flesh and blood this way.
ReplyDeleteI often think about how my own mother - who had been confined to wheelchair due to a stroke (and having lost her legs to diabetes complications) - and how my family took care of her. Myself, my father, sister, and even my teenaged neice were all available to make sure she was clean, fed and dressed daily. We helped her shower, get to the potty, and take her out for various appointments and shopping trips in a special chair accessible van. We never gave up on her, despite the difficulties, until God took her from us two years ago.
Yet here we have a form of life that is lower than the maggots she allowed to infest her mother's body. It's despicable!