Story Archive

Wide-Awake Nightmare

Tammy Cleveland was rather distressed when a doctor at DeGraff Memorial Hospital near Buffalo, N.Y., declared her husband, Michael Cleveland, 46, dead. She wasn’t distressed because he was dead, but because he wasn’t: she says he was clearly breathing, his eyes were open, he was moving around, and fighting the breathing tube in his throat. “I said, ‘But he’s responding to me,” Mrs. Cleveland remembers telling the doctor. “He [tried] to hug me’.” Nope, the doctor said, he just “had a lot of energy to expel from his body” and was dead. Even the coroner said — twice — that Cleveland was still alive, but the doctor checked three times, she says, and said no, he was dead. She says that on the fourth call-back, 100 minutes after the initial death declaration, the doctor, Gregory Perry, finally checked and exclaimed, “My God, he has a pulse!” and ordered treatment. Cleveland really did die the next day. Tammy Cleveland is suing the doctor and the hospital. About the doctor, she says, “I wonder if he’s having nightmares like I am.” (RC/Rochester Democrat & Chronicle) ...If you chose the right lawyer, he will.