Having to go to the hospital can be incredibly stressful.
People should not have to worry if their doctor or nurse has ill intent.
And this doctor was just found guilty of one crime too nightmarish to imagine.
Dallas Anesthesiologist Raynaldo Ortiz was convicted of a crime that just amplified people’s fears about hospitals.
Ortiz injected dangerous drugs into patient IV bags, allegedly in retaliation for a disciplinary inquiry that was opened against him.
Malignant narcissist
Colleagues claimed that Ortiz told them the medical center was attempting to “crucify” him.
“The facts brought out at trial in this case are particularly disturbing,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian M. Boynton, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, said. “The department will work with its law enforcement partners to hold accountable anyone who puts patients’ lives at risk by tampering with critical medical products.”
“Dr. Ortiz cloaked himself in the white coat of a healer, but instead of curing pain, he inflicted it,” Boynton added. “He assembled ticking time bombs, then sat in wait as those medical time bombs went off one by one, toxic cocktails flowing into the veins of patients who were often at their most vulnerable, lying unconscious on the operating table. We saw the patients testify. Their pain, their fear and their trauma was palpable in that courtroom.”
One of Ortiz’s victims was fellow anesthesiologist Melanie Kaspar, who unknowingly took a contaminated IV bag home to rehydrate from an illness.
As soon as Kaspar inserted the IV solution into her vein, she suffered a cardiac episode and died.
The New York Post reported that an “autopsy showed she was fatally poisoned by bupivacaine — a numbing agent that the Justice Department said ‘is rarely abused’ but used to alleviate pain during surgery.”
Thirteen separate patients suffered similar cardiac events, but Ortiz was only charged in four instances.
Warning signs
This is not the first time that Ortiz exhibited sociopathic behavior.
The Post added that one “judge had ordered Ortiz be held before trial after prosecutors argued that he was a danger to the community by citing, in part, a 2015 incident in which he shot his neighbor’s dog in retaliation for the woman helping his then-girlfriend obtain a restraining order against him after a domestic violence incident.”
Ortiz’s crimes are particularly disturbing because of the violation of trust.
The medical profession cannot function if patients believe that their doctors are literally trying to kill them.