You couldn’t dream up some of the headlines these days.
Even taking into consideration that a nurse in Minnesota was addicted to pain killers, it is hard to fathom that she would steal more than two thirds of the 500 micrograms of fentanyl reserved for a patient who was about to undergo surgery to have kidney stones removed.
Fentanyl is considered to be highly addictive because the opium-based medication is about 80 times stronger than morphine. Hospitals use fentanyl for anesthesia because it is powerful and fast-acting.
Here’s the skinny…
A male patient at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis was scheduled to have surgery for kidney-stone removal on Nov. 8 last year. The surgery took place, but it was excruciatingly painful for the patient, who screamed and yelled, and had to be held down by medical staff in order for the procedure to be completed. The procedure involves a tube being inserted through the patient’s back and into one of their kidneys.
Hospital staff told authorities that, during the surgery, registered nurse Sarah May Casareto acted intoxicated, slurred her speech, stopped attending her patient, fell asleep and also knocked over some medication near the end of the procedure.
During the surgery, and as the patient was moaning, Casareto told the patient to “Go to your beach… Go to your happy place.” That was according to a technician who assisted with the procedure. After the surgery, hospital staff found that Casareto’s scrubs contained empty syringes with labels peeled off, which violates hospital policy.
When approached after the surgery, Casareto resigned instead of submitting to a drug test.
The patient filed a formal complaint with local police on Dec. 4, and an investigation was launched. The complaint states that, before the surgery, Casareto told the patient, “You’re gonna have to man up here and take some of the pain because we can’t give you a lot of medication.”
Casareto has been licensed as a nurse in Minnesota since 2006, and there was no record of any disciplinary action taken against her before this incident.
County Attorney Mike Freeman said the investigation into the incident is not yet complete, and that if Casareto is convicted, prosecutors will seek jail time instead of the probation that is prescribed by sentencing guidelines for the offense.
Certainly, the powers of addiction can cause people to do some things they would normally not do. It’s just a shame that finding out what other people are truly capable of comes at the expense of innocent victims. And at the expense of everyone else, due to the victim’s slam-dunk lawsuit that will surely bring him a large sum of money.
Healthcare is costly enough without incidents like this.
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