VA Breathing Lapse 'Shocked' Doctors

VA Breathing Lapse 'Shocked’ Doctors

By John Barton
STAFF REPORTER

DETROIT — An elderly Brighton man’s doctors said Friday they were “surprised” and “shocked” at his sudden breathing failure while he was a patient in the Ann Arbor VA Hospital.

Dr. Richard Dickerman, the former chief resident in surgery at the Fuller Road hospital, described Charles Gasmire, then 87, as being in “pretty good shape” when he was operated on for cancer of the lower bowel July 28, 1975.

But the next day, Gasmire suddenly stopped breathing while he was recovering from surgery in the hospital’s third-floor intensive care unit (ICU). Dickerman and Dr. Jon Benner, another member of the team who performed the surgery on Gasmire, described the 2 1/2-hour operation as routine and successful.

“I feel something out of the ordinary was done to make him stop breathing,” Dickerman testified in response to a question from asst. U.S. Atty. Richard L. Delonis.

“I THINK,” Dickerman added, “this man was paralyzed.”

Earlier, Gasmire’s son Richard, a businessman from Middletown, N.J., testified he saw a Filipina nurse, Leonora Perez, standing at his father’s bedside while he was struggling for breath. But, Gasmire testified, Perez did nothing to help him.

Federal prosecutors are attempting to prove that Perez and Filipina Narciso, both nurses in the ICU, murdered two hospitalized veterans and poisoned seven others (including Gasmire) with injections of the muscle relaxing drug Pavulon.

Under questioning by Thomas C. O’Brien, one of the four lawyers defending the two women in the trial which ended its fourth week Friday, the younger Gasmire admitted the time Perez spent at his father’s bedside watching his struggle for breath could have been anywhere from “two seconds to two minutes.”

“GOD,” GASMIRE blurted in response to one of O’Brien’s questions, “I didn’t have a stop watch. I can’t be sure exactly how long it was."

The time element is crucial to the prosecution’s contention that Perez injected Pavulon into the elder Gasmire’s intravenous feeding tubes. According to prosecution theories of the hospital murders and poisonings, the drug should begin taking effect within as few as 30 seconds after it is administered.

Benner, who successfully revived Gasmire from the alleged attack, called the breathing failure “quite unexpected."

“That was the surprising thing about it,” Benner testified, "there were no indications — and there usually are when a patient begins to lose breathing capabilities. But in this case, there were no indications at all."