Afghanistan Vet, Purple Heart Recipient Dies Of Treatable Condition Waiting For ICU Bed

BELLVILLE, TX — Daniel Wilkinson survived two tours of duty in Afghanistan with the Army but died of an easily treated condition while doctors scoured about a half dozen states looking for an ICU bed.

The 46-year-old Texas man’s death to gallstone pancreatitis — an illness his doctor said could have been treated with a 30-minute surgery — underscores an acute shortage of ICU beds as COVID-19 hospitalizations return to the high levels of the past winter.

U.S. hospitalizations for coronavirus infections have increased nearly 500 percent in the last two months and are now averaging about 100,000 a day as the delta variant surges, primarily among people who haven’t been vaccinated.

That’s less than the average of 140,000 hospitalizations a day in the winter surge before vaccines were available, but more than any other COVID-19 surge in the 18-month pandemic.

Wilkinson’s mother took him to a hospital in Bellville, Texas, about 65 miles northwest of Houston after he began feeling ill on Aug. 23. The hospital wasn’t equipped to treat the condition.

“I do labs on him, I get labs, and the labs come back, and I'm at the computer, and I have one of those ‘Oh, crap’ moments. If that stone doesn't spontaneously come out and doesn't resolve itself, that fluid just builds up, backs up into the liver, backs up into the pancreas, and starts to shut down those organs,” the attending emergency room physician, Dr. Hasan Kakli, told “CBS This Morning.”

In the pre-pandemic era, the transfer to a hospital with the capability to treat gallstone pancreatitis would have been a simple matter.

But there were no ICU beds to be found in hospitals across Texas. Or in Arkansas or Oklahoma or Kansas. It appeared he might have to be airlifted to a hospital with an ICU bed and the staff to care for Wilkinson in Colorado when an opening occurred at a VA hospital in Houston.

It meant Wilkinson could have the surgery close to home — but by that time, seven hours had passed, and it was too late to save his life.

“I think the doctors did everything they could once they got him,” Wilkinson’s mother, Michelle Puget, told news station KPRC. “But … it had been [seven] hours. And it’s something that needed to be taken care of right away.”

Puget told “CBS This Morning” that her son came home from Afghanistan with a Purple Heart after serving a country he loved, but “it was a gallstone that took him out.”

Wilkinson shouldn’t have died, Kakli told CBS.

“I've never lost a patient from this diagnosis, ever," he said. “We know what needs to be done and we know how to treat it, and we get them to where they need to go."

Kakli worries about the “next time” as the pandemic pressures an already-burdened health care system, especially in states such as Texas, which ranks second to Florida in new COVID-19 infections.

“I’m scared that the next patient that I see is someone that I can’t get to where they need to get to go,” Kakli told CBS.

Not only are ICUl beds are becoming more scarce across the country, especially in the hard-hit South, but acute staffing shortages add more pressure to the health care system. The state is sending in 8,000 temporary health care workers to overtaxed hospitals.

The government-supported Harris Health System was at a breaking point when 100 of those workers were assigned to the hospitals in its network.

Dr. Esmaeil Porsa, the health system’s chief executive, told the Texas Tribune the nurses, respiratory therapists and other contract staff “definitely arrived here at a pivotal moment.”

“They did exactly what I had hoped that they would do, which is allowing us the opportunity of a couple of things: to provide a little bit of relief for front-line staff who have been running around ragged, but also created an opportunity for us to expand our capacity,” Porsa said.

This is the second time Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered the deployment of temporary health care workers. As COVID-19 cases surged last winter, he ordered 14,000 medical workers deployed across Texas. From July 2020 to early August 2021, Texas spent $5 billion in federal disaster and coronavirus relief funds to pay health care workers.

Carrie Williams, a spokesperson for the Texas Hospital Association, told the Texas Tribune the surge of COVID-19 cases from the delta variant “has come faster and stronger than previous surges, and it comes at a time when the frontline [worker] is burned out.”

Houston is known for world-class medical facilities, but the COVID-19 crisis has put its reputation on the line.

“We are playing musical chairs, with 100 people and 10 chairs,” Kakli told CBS. “When the music stops, what happens? People from all over the world come to Houston to get medical care and, right now, Houston can't take care of patients from the next town over. That's the reality.”