kenny18

Hello again, I am still looking through paperwork. I have a lot of stuff to go through unfortunately but I know the autopsy report is somewhere in that storage space. I don't know if their dad filed anything. Is there a way to check? I'm not sure if he is even aware that our mom died. He moved across the country and then was in Afghanistan for a while. I've tried to reach out to him on multiple occasions but he always sends my letters back unopened because he probably thinks they are from my mom and not me personally. I think that my mom was supposed to be paying child support but wasn't able to because she was intermittently homeless. Sometimes she slept at the church and other times she was able to get an apartment. It was so sad to see her go through all that. She was a really good person. I volunteer with homeless people and it's so frustrating how many of them are veterans with stories similar to my mother's. They try to apply for assistance and get this crazy run-around with paperwork and miss deadlines and such because they don't have a permanent address. Fortunately we have a veterans assistance center in town but some of the veterans have psychological trouble and not just physical, so for them it is even harder. I feel so mad about how my mom was treated. She joined when she was only 18 and gave everything she had, worked so hard, and then when she got sick the military totally turned its back on her and treated her like a stack of paperwork instead of a human being. My baby cousin joined the Marines last year and I am so worried that if something ever happens to him that they might treat him with the same cold disregard. I think the next step right now is to keep digging through the papers or just contact the medical examiner to get another copy. Then I will post that for yall and request the full records. Tbh even if they don't approve any help for my sisters I don't care. At this point I just want them to at least acknowledge that they made a mistake. Sorry for the long post without much helpful info. Just wanted to let you know I'm still here and still working on this. Thank you so much for all the info. It's a lot to look in to!!

Wow, thank you all so much for the kind words and helpful responses. I greatly appreciate the time you took to help me and I will do my best to communicate fully and follow your advice. I apologize for not responding sooner. This is a difficult topic to think about and I had to look for paperwork. There are a lot of questions in your replies, so I will try to answer them all below. I will set an alarm to log on again soon so that you do not wait again so long for a response from me in the future.' Berta, in your post you said that the VA caused your husband's death at only 47 years. You have my utmost sympathy and condolences. I am so sorry to hear of such a senseless and avoidable loss. How do they determine this date? The doctors at the VA had me come to a meeting with them right away after my mom died. They never said anything about malpractice. They tried to imply that it was suicide or that it was God giving mercy to her because she was in pain. My family is very religious and we knew in our hearts that she never would have killed herself, so we believed that God loved her so much that he simply took her to be in heaven so she wouldn't suffer anymore. I didn't request an autopsy report until years later. When I finally did, I didn't understand it so I called the medical examiner's office to ask questions. Even then, no one told me this was an impossibly high concentration of amlodipine. They said the medical examiner who did my mom's autopsy didn't work there anymore and that her death must have been caused by an unexplained interaction between her medicines. It wasn't until I went to graduate school that I learned enough about chemistry to research this online and find out that this was almost certainly a mistake at the hospital. Although I read about this medicine online, I still don't know 100% for sure it was malpractice. I'm not a doctor and don't even have the detailed records from those two weeks in the VA hospital like I asked for. Getting an independent medical opinion sounds like a good idea. Do you have any guidance for how to find this? Will my own regular doctor be able to do it or is this some kind of specialist? When I googled this term I just found a bunch of personal injury lawyer's websites, not doctors. Regardless of a VA claim, I want to understand what happened. That is the most important thing because this was really shocking and we still don't fully understand what happened or why. But also it would be good if there is some paperwork that can still be filed to help my sisters afford college. If the independent medical opinion says that this was malpractice, could the VA consider that opinion to be the date of me becoming aware of it? No, she was divorced. She died in 2010. The letter provides a "file number" which is her SSN and also a "request number". Are either of these the "C file number"? I am the oldest child so I think they should accept applications from me. Yes, my two sisters were both under 18. One just turned 18 this summer and the other is 17. They both want to go to college so I am interested to know if there are any education benefits or scholarships they can apply for. Our mom sporadically took classes at a college but never was able to finish anything because she was always in and out of the hospital. I think this was paid by the military. When I was studying for my Bachelors, my mom asked me for some of my college enrollment and transcripts and said it was for some military education benefit. I had a decent scholarship though so I didn't need the education benefits from the military and never gave her the documents she asked for. But now that my sisters are older, I wish I knew what she was trying to apply for with my paperwork so that I could see if my sisters would qualify, or if there is any transferable education benefit from my mom because my mom never finished school. Someone at the VA assistance center in Denver, CO. They didn't fill out the forms; they just printed a few pages and had me sign them and then they mailed it somewhere. Yes, I will post it along with two other letters. First letter is from December 10, 2014 saying the claim is being processed. Second letter is from December 12, 2014 saying the claim is denied. Third letter is from May 2017 saying they don't have the medical records. No. They sent me a CD with a bunch of junk info that doesn't explain about that two week hospital stay. The letter from May 2017 says to contact the hospital but I haven't done that because it seems like everyone I contact with the VA is just giving me the run-around. The letter doesn't say who at the hospital to contact specifically so it's pretty much guaranteed that I will contact the wrong person, wait six months for an answer, and then get yet another letter saying they can't or won't help. The toxicology report says the concentration but doesn't numerically compare it to the therapeutic dose. I had to learn about obscure medical terminology and do my own research online to find out that the reported concentration is 500 times more than it should have been. No. The EMTs took all her medicines to the hospital with her when the ambulance came. I don't know what the hospital did with them. What is a C file and how do I request it? I'm a student so if it is thousands of dollars I probably couldn't afford it until I graduate, but if it is a few hundred dollars then I can get it. What do I need to prepare for it? They didn't say anything about it. I'm the oldest so I think I am the one who has to apply. And my sisters are too young to deal with this mess anyway. I don't know. I don't have a copy of the application that was sent through the VA assistance center. I wrote down whatever the assistance worker said. I don't remember if he asked about my sisters. Same as above. I didn't find the autopsy report in my paperwork. I have to go to the storage unit and look for it there. The report measures it in concentration, like XX mg/L, not just mass like mg. I don't remember off the top of my head. I'll look for the report this weekend. How do I get them to give me such specific information? Do you think if I call the Denver VA hospital again that they will give me the records this time? What terminology do I need to use to get them to send me the correct information and not a list of the name of every doctor she ever saw in her life? 2010 Migraines and mental health. She started getting the migraines while she was in the Navy and I think it was considered service-connected. The mental health was related to losing custody of my sisters. Colorado I need to look for the death certificate and autopsy report this weekend to double-check but I'm pretty sure the death certificate says the phrase 'amlodipine toxicity'. None of the paperwork says or suggests suicide. My first priority is to get them to send her full records and have them review it to find out why she died. Or maybe I will need to get the independent medical opinion if they won't review it. We are all doing well with our lives and will be fine if they don't approve any benefits or claims. If it's still possible to apply/appeal, it would be appreciated if they will help us financially. I had to drop out of college to deal with the aftermath of my mom's death and was homeless for a while and that definitely set me back in my education/career/life. Fortunately my sisters were shielded from a lot of that, but still their life hasn't been as easy as it could have been and I want them to go to a good college so they can make the most of themselves. It is definitely not within the first year and I didn't appeal their letters by mail. I called the VA and asked some questions and they transferred me to a line where I had to leave my info to get on a waiting list for a return call. I finally got their return call months later when I was in the shower. It went to voicemail and I saw it when I got out of the shower. I sorta gave up on it after that because dealing with them is so slow and hard and it seems totally pointless to try. Nothing I do has worked at all aside from getting that useless list of doctors names. This seems like a waste of time and effort but it still gnaws at me that I don't know exactly what happened to my mom, and now with my sisters applying to college I feel like I ought to try one more time. It just says "because you did not provide complete information or evidence". It doesn't explain what specific info or evidence they want. Here are the letters... First letter saying application is being processed: Second letter saying application is denied: Third letter saying they don't have the records:

Hello, I just found this forum and am wondering if anyone could give me some advice. My mom was a disabled Navy veteran. She was an inpatient at the VA hospital for two weeks and was discharged the last day around 5pm. She seemed fine and went out to dinner with a friend. She collapsed in the bathroom later that night around midnight. Her friend heard her fall and called an ambulance. The ambulance brought her to a normal hospital (not the VA hospital) and she died there a few hours later. The autopsy shows that she died from a massive overdose of blood pressure medicine, amlodipine. Her blood level of amlodipine was 500 times higher than the therapeutic dose. She had normal levels of all her other medicines. I did research about amlodipine deaths and it happens when someone is given too much of the medicine and it builds up in the body over time and then kills them. It takes a while to have the toxic effect so this was definitely caused by something they did at the hospital before she was discharged. There is no way this was suicide - she didn't even have that much medicine and there were no pills in her stomach. I submitted a request for records but the VA only gave me basic info. I asked for complete info regarding that hospital stay, like specifically what dose of what medicines was she given at what time and by whom. Instead, they sent me a CD with 700 pages of records listing all the dates she had ever had a doctors appointment in her life and the names of the doctor for each appointment, but no specific info about that hospital stay like I asked. I went in person to both the VA hospital and to an assistance center and got no effective help. The assistance center had me file a bunch of paperwork that I don't really understand. I got a denial in the mail saying that the VA denies "DIC, Death Pension, and/or Accrued Benefits" because of "you did not provide complete information or evidence". I called them to ask about what info they need specifically. They were not at all helpful and now it is past the appeal date. I'm not sure if this paperwork from the assistance center was even the right stuff to submit. Does anyone have any advice for what to do in this situation? I want the VA to tell me what exactly happened and why they killed my mom. She was only 44 years old. My little sisters have to grow up without even knowing their own mom.