Woman's death from asthma attack illustrates deadly gaps in rural emergency services and hospitals, papers report

Shyteria Shoemaker (Photo
provided to Clarion-Ledger)

A story out of Mississippi shows how the gaps in rural emergency services, and possibly police mistakes, can be fatal in situations where minutes count. Shyteria Shoemaker, a 23-year-old pregnant woman with a toddler, died Jan. 27 from an apparent asthma attack after she couldn't get help quickly enough in Chickasaw County, pop. 17,392, Floyd Ingram reports for the Chickasaw Journal in Houston, Miss.

Part of the problem was lack of ambulance service. Two ambulances operate in the county at all times, one in Houston and one in Okolona, but the Houston driver had a family emergency and left duty a little more than an hour before Shoemaker's asthma attack, Giacomo Bologna reports for the Clarion Ledger in Jackson. That left only one ambulance, and it was picking up another patient at the time of Shoemaker's attack.

The other big problem: Trace Regional Hospital in Houston had closed its emergency room in 2014, citing bad debts of patients who couldn't pay. According to a timeline in the two newspapers, a cousin of Shoemaker's called 911 in Chickasaw County at 1:18 a.m. saying Shoemaker was having difficulty breathing. Dispatchers sent an ambulance from Okolona, near her home in Houston. At 1:25 a second call alerted them that they were headed to the hospital; dispatchers told them there was no emergency room there, and told them to go to the local fire department.

Chickasaw County and Houston
(Wikipedia map)

At 1:26 Shoemaker arrived at the department. Firefighters there decided she needed to go to the emergency room at Memorial Baptist Hospital in Calhoun City, 25 minutes away, but Shoemaker was unconscious and her cousins worried the firefighters weren't responding quickly enough, and drove a block to downtown to flag down police. One cousin said police believed they were a threat and ordered them to the ground, further delaying the response. Dispatchers rerouted the ambulance downtown, which took Shoemaker to the hospital. But she was pronounced dead at 2:38 a.m. "They tried to resuscitate here for about 20 to 30 minutes, but never got her to come around," Coroner Jerry Wayne Fleming told Ingram.

"Last fall the community seemed to be seeking ways to revive the emergency room or some kind of after-hours clinic with several people writing a series of letters to the Chickasaw Journal about the issue," Ingram reports. "Nothing materialized."