A excerpt from A Mind Unraveled: A Memoir. Copyright © 2018 by Kurt Eichenwald. Published by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
I awoke in pain. Sometime during a seizure, I had fallen down the stairs outside of my bedroom and banged myself up. I suspected I broke a bone and decided to get an X-ray once I was more coherent. About an hour later, I hailed a cab and asked to go to the nearest hospital. Any doctor, I figured, could find a fracture. The cabby dropped me off at Capitol Hill Hospital.
I remember little that followed, but my father later told me what happened. Someone checked my blood sugar levels with a test strip. The person wrote down the results incorrectly, stating they came from a complete glucose test—involving drawing blood—rather than the finger stick that was performed. Mistake piled on mistake, and soon a doctor diagnosed pancreatic cancer. I may have gone into convulsions in the emergency room, and my planned short visit turned into a major hospitalization.
No one checked my MedicAlert, which disclosed my epilepsy and instructed medical teams to check my wallet for a card with my anticonvulsant schedule and emergency contact information. As a result, the hospital stopped providing my medication. For days, each time I went into convulsions, the staff infused IV valium to stop the seizure. At one point, I opened my eyes and saw my friend Neil Fisher standing by me. I didn’t know how he had ended up there, but I recognized I was in danger.
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