Karina update

Karina update, May 25th, 2012 English and Danish

Good news! Karina is getting her first intravenous treatment at home today, on May 25th! Actually, this afternoon, she is already getting the IV drop!

On Wednesday the 23rd, an appointed doctor and Dr. Isager visited Karina’s house. The appointed doctor told Karina’s parents that there were no further plans to remove Karina from her home and that they would work on getting the IV started in the home right away. It still seems unreal to the family. They have been through so much. They send their thanks to all of you who wrote and posted about Karina. They are sure it helped.

One correction about my earlier posts: I wrote that the Board of Health planned to commit Karina and I want to clarify what I meant.  The Board of Health technically cannot commit anyone because a doctor has to sign the paperwork. So the Board of Health did not directly order Karina to be committed, but a consulting doctor at the Board of Health ordered Karina’s GP to do it.  

This consulting doctor, LG, called Karina’s GP on May 1st and told her that a psychiatrist in Copenhagen – who had never seen Karina – concluded from his information,  that Karina must be in a “lunatic-like state” and should be committed immediately. The GP did not want to do this; she wrote that there should be an evaluation to indicate if this was necessary. The GP warned the parents about the contents of the call from the Board of Health’s consulting doctor. 

On May 3rd, LG called Karina’s GP again and said that a meeting had been held about Karina with LG’s boss, and the conclusion of that meeting was, that the Board of Health believed, that Karina’s GP was required to do as they asked.  LG told her, it was her duty as a doctor. A lawyer (I think from the Board of Health) told Karina’s GP the same thing: that she had to do this. The GP writes in Karina’s journal that she was ordered to do it. It is clear that she felt that she had no choice but to visit Karina with the order to commit her. A lot of doctors would have given into the pressure and signed the papers, but this GP did not. And her courage to do what she felt was right, gave the family and the world time to act. Thank you.

My worry at this point is where the blame will be placed. How is the Board of Health going to spin this? We can only wait and see, but what I hope happens is that they take a good hard look at the way they have been treating ME patients up to now. Karina’s GP tried for months to get Karina the IV, she needed and was told time and again that the only treatment she was allowed to offer Karina was psychological help at a center for functional somatic disorders. No matter how the government tries to spin that, it can only be explained by the fact that the Danish government has allowed ME to be categorized and mistreated as a psychiatric illness. 

But let’s look forward. My hope is that the Karina-crisis has opened some hearts and some minds and that things will start to change for the better. Right now, Karina is so ill that she is unaware of the impact she has had on people. But I hope that someday she will be well enough to sit at the computer and read about it.

This update has been approved by the family.