L.E. Madisons Rehabilitation

My name is Isaac Madison,

On August 29, our brother, L.E. Madison Jr had cardiac arrest. He's been in the hospital for about a month now and has been on and off showing signs of slow recovery. The medical team has determined that he should be moved from the hospital to a critical care facility for rehab. The insurance company doesn't want to do it.

On July 11, 2019 Johns Hopkins produced A Scientific Statement On Predicting Survival for Cardiac Arrest Survivors. In this statement they seem to be of the opinion that families are often rushed into making critical, possibly end of life decisions prematurely.

"Because of low quality, flawed research, decisions related to current policies may result in prediction errors that may forecast a poor outcome for patients who may have a good outcome, or vice versa. Moreover, the lack of standards for predicting outcomes has made it all but impossible to properly study therapies that could potentially heal the brain and the rest of the body after being resuscitated from cardiac arrest."

“We owe it to patients and families to ensure we are doing the best to both not prolong unnecessary suffering while balancing that with not withdrawing care too soon if the person has the potential to recover with a reasonably good quality of life,” says Romergryko Geocadin, M.D., the chair of the expert panel and professor of neurology, neurosurgery, and anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “At the current state of affairs, we have to acknowledge the limitations in our practices in this area because we don’t have high-quality science to back our decision-making.”

“One possible reason that every single drug that has been tested in clinical trials to heal brain injury after cardiac arrest may have failed is because the studies are designed to look for these drug effects at 30 or 90 days after successful resuscitation from cardiac arrest, but we don’t allow most of the patients time to recover for that period. Instead, early predictions on recovery (within 72 hours) are made based on low-quality studies,” says Geocadin."

We had to battle with staff trying to pressure us into making end-of-life decisions too quickly. But because we stubbornly refused to take the advice of the first medical team, our brother was assigned another Doctor, Dr. Adizz. Thanks to the work of Dr. Adizz, my brother was moved out of ICU several weeks ago. He has been steadily progressing thanks to the work of this doctor. He is no longer on the breathing machine, his blood pressure has stabilized, and a couple of weeks ago, they moved him to a facility to begin rehab. However, we continue raising funds to protect him against costs that are not covered by his insurance and against the possibility of him exceeding the lifetime maximum that is usually contained in health insurance policies. At this point, It looks like he's going to make it and your generosity and care helped make this possible.

Thank you.

Isaac Madison