A nurse in Wisconsin has been charged with elder abuse, accused of amputating a hospice patient’s frostbitten foot without his consent and without doctor’s orders.
After she cut off the man’s right foot last Spring, Mary K. Brown, 38, of Durand, told her colleagues that she wanted to display it at her family’s taxidermy shop with a sign that said: “Wear your boots kids," according to charges filed last week in Pierce County.
The amputation happened May 27, and within about a week the 62-year-old man was dead....
...According to the complaint, the man was admitted to Spring Valley Health and Rehab Center after he fell at his home in March. The heat in his home was not turned on, and he suffered frostbite to both feet, leaving the tissue necrotic. His right foot remained attached to his leg by a tendon and roughly 2 inches (5 centimeters) of skin.
One nurse who had changed the man's bandages on the morning of May 27 said he could wiggle his toes, the complaint said. Brown told two other nurses at shift change that she was “going to cut off the victim’s foot for comfort,” but they told her not to. Brown and two certified nursing assistants went into the man's room to change his bandages, but Brown cut his foot off instead, one of the nursing assistants told an investigator. ...
...Brown told an investigator that the man did not ask her to remove his foot, which she described as “mummy feet,” but that there was no life in the foot and she did it to make his quality of life better, the complaint said. She acknowledged that it was outside her scope of practice and that she did not have authorization. ..
Tweety, BSN, RN
36,354 Posts
Agree. My first thought was reading the headline and thinking "does a doctor ever give orders to a nurse to amputate a foot"? It just went on from there.