U.S. Army veteran dies of a treatable illness as COVID fills hospital beds, leaving doctors "playing musical chairs"

When U.S. Army veteran Daniel Wilkinson started feeling sick last week, he went to the hospital in Bellville, Texas, outside Houston. His health problem wasn't related to COVID-19, but Wilkinson needed advanced care, and with the coronavirus filling up intensive care beds, he couldn't get it in time to save his life.

Belville emergency room physician Dr. Hasan Kakli treated Wilkinson, and discovered that he had gallstone pancreatitis, something the Belville hospital wasn't equipped to treat.

"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. His bloodwork even showed that his kidneys were shutting down."

Kakli told Begnaud that his patient was dying right in front of him. Wilkinson needed a higher level of care, but with hospitals across Texas and much of the South overwhelmed with COVID patients, there was no place for him.

Kakli recalled making multiple phone calls to other facilities, only to get a lot of, "sorry … sorry … sorry," in reply. Places had the specialists to do the procedure, but because of how sick he was Wilkinson needed intensive care, and they didn't have an ICU bed to put him in.

For nearly seven hours Wilkinson waited in an ER bed at Belville.

Finally, a bed opened up at the V.A. hospital in Houston. It was a helicopter ride away.

Kakli recalled Wilkinson saying, "Oh, man, I promised myself after Afghanistan I would never be in a helicopter again! … Oh, well, I guess."

Wilkinson was airlifted to Houston, but it was too late.

"They weren't able to do the procedure on him because it had been too long," his mother told Begnaud. "They] told me that they had seen air pockets in his intestines, which means that they were already starting to die off. They told me that I had to make a decision, and I knew how Danny felt; he didn't want to be that way. And, so, we were all in agreement that we had to let him go."

Roughly 24 hours after he walked into the emergency room, Daniel Wilkinson died at the age of 46.

Kakli told Begnaud that if it weren't for the COVID crisis, the procedure for Wilkinson would have taken 30 minutes, and he'd have been back out the door.

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