Rocío Muñoz, Carla’s mother, tells Europa Hoy a story that will not leave you unmoved. A young girl, 24 years old, held against her will in the HUBU, specifically in the psychiatric ward of the University Hospital of Burgos (HUBU), now two months since June 10 and under psychiatric treatment when in reality she has a physical illness and no mental disorder as confirmed again and again from the HUBU to the family.
At the moment, Rocío tells us, Carla is under psychiatric medication for no logical reason. “The real diagnosis is advanced Lyme disease, transmitted by the bite of a tick, according to diagnostic tests carried out by doctors outside the hospital.
The symptoms of this disease are very varied: from digestive, vascular, neurological, endocrine to fibromyalgia-like symptoms, as well as a drop in the immune system. The type of test necessary to detect this disease is not carried out by the Social Security because of its high rate of false negatives, and therefore it is necessary to go to external laboratories where tests such as elispot, phagos test, Galaxy nanotrap antigen test and Paldispot, among others, are carried out.
As has been documented, Carla, suffering from this infectious and multisystemic disease, comes to the health service with multiple organic symptoms: involuntary weight loss, muscle and joint pain, vascular ulcers, oedema in the lower limbs, livedo reticularis, vertebral fractures, narrowing of the mesenteric artery at the junction with the celiac trunk and recurrent infections due to her immunosuppression.
This department, unable to find the reason for the organic ailments detected and seeing the progressive and unstoppable physical deterioration she is suffering, decided, incomprehensibly for all the health professionals we asked, to transfer her to the psychiatric ward with the excuse that she was in a more aseptic place.
It does not seem logical to ignore the use of the ICU where the monitoring and treatment of her illness could be adequate.
Instead she is transferred to psychiatry, her IVs are removed (Carla is also diabetic), she is isolated from the outside world, she is prevented from having a telephone, from receiving the necessary visits and not even from communicating freely with her loved ones (which violates everything that the UN and the World Health Organisation are pushing for in their “Quality and Rights” programme). In the meantime Carla sees her colleagues on that floor interacting with each other and with the outside world, doing activities with the occupational therapist, socialising and even being able to receive phone calls which she is denied so that she cannot contact the press “as there is an open judicial process against that hospital”, forced to be alone 24 hours a day staring at the four walls of her white and sad room.
In addition, in recent weeks, according to information provided by Rocío to Europa Hoy, she has been expropriated by the hospital staff. She is given unnecessary treatment with counterproductive side effects and “which not only does not help to improve Carla’s physical pathologies, but can also cause irreversible damage by preventing her from receiving the correct medical attention or masking important symptoms that should be treated”. All this without Carla’s consent and in complete violation of Carla’s rights as a patient, as the Junta de Castilla y León explains on its website:
“It is the right to choose freely, after receiving adequate information, between the different options for the application of a diagnostic, prognostic or therapeutic procedure presented to me by the professional responsible, and to not have any action affecting my health carried out without my prior consent.”
And it seems that it is not that the medical evidence of Carla’s illness has not been presented, “it is simply the negligence or inability to accept errors or corrections that prevents the medical team that attended Carla in internal medicine and now in psychiatry, from listening; listening to other health professionals or the calls for help from Carla and her family”.
The HUBU management, continues Rocío, is aware of the legal proceedings and orders the doctors to restrict all the rights of the young woman and the patient’s autonomy, while Carla languishes in the prime of her youth, defenceless, suffering, fading away.
Links between HUBU management and Justice in Brugos?
Who is interested in Carla’s continued admission to psychiatry when what she wants is to be transferred to another hospital she trusts in order to receive the appropriate treatment for her pathologies? wonders Rocío.
What hidden interests are there in this case in which other people are deciding for Carla without letting her participate in the decision-making process in relation to her health, completely disregarding her human rights?
How is it possible that we find ourselves with a legal defencelessness of such magnitude in a State governed by the rule of law as Spain is supposed to be? Does it have anything to do with the fact that the judge investigating Carla’s case is the sister of the Head of Pneumology at the HUBU?
Who is going to take responsibility for this if a fatal outcome such as the one documented below occurs?
All these questions are constantly on the minds of Carla’s mother and relatives, as they feel the impotence typical of a David and Goliath struggle.
What Carla wants, says her mother, is to get out of psychiatry and go to a trusted hospital with professionals who are able and willing to look at her real physical medical situation without prejudice and who will do their best to restore her health.
While she is denied the correct treatment and her human rights are flagrantly violated, Rocío tells Europa Hoy, Carla is deteriorating physically and emotionally in an irreversible way. It was not so long ago that we could forget the fatal outcome of the case of Andreas Fernández, who died at the age of 26, physically ill and, like Carla, was denied proper treatment and unjustifiably admitted to psychiatry.
