Sun Ng’s daughter had to sue an Illinois hospital to allow a doctor to give her father the safe, FDA-approved drug that saved his life. The hospital fought hard to denny Mr Ng treatment, even though he was almost dead.
Trista Ng asked officials at Edward Hospital again and again. Give my father ivermectin for covid.
“Numerous times” the Naperville, Illinois, hospital told her no, she said. No to an FDA-approved drug. No to her offer to release the hospital of “any liability.”
“The doctors and administration refused,” she wrote in a plea to DuPage County Circuit Court Judge Paul Fullerton, who on November 5 answered with a simple yes, telling hospital administrators, “Step aside.”
Last Saturday, nineteen days after his first of five court-ordered ivermectin doses, Sun Ng, seventy-one, came home: To a joyful wife of forty years, Ying. To a year-old granddaughter, Kaylie. To a son-in-law, Hayden, and a daughter who asked only — after the hospital’s menu of Covid care had failed — to give her father “a fighting chance.”
“My dad is home today,” Trista Ng texted me after her father’s discharge, with a photo of Sun Ng, a retired contractor from Hong Kong who is staying with his daughter, waving tentatively for the camera. This was an elderly man who two weeks before, and five days into his ivermectin treatment, awoke from a medically induced coma and pulled out his endotracheal tube; a man who at that point was confused, weak, and unable to swallow, speak, or walk. He may have a long rehabilitation ahead, but the worst appears to be over.
Sun and Ying Ng celebrating their granddaughter’s first birthday, before covid — and a hospital that refused him a life-saving drug — almost killed him.
“His mind is clear now, like before covid,” said Man Kwan Ng, his daughter who holds a PhD in mechanical engineering and goes by the name Trista.
On Saturday, Ying Ng, also seventy-one, baby in her arms, watched from the window as ambulance attendants carried her husband up the few steps of the family’s townhome in Aurora. “Your grandpa is coming back,” she said excitedly, her daughter recalled, adding, “It was very welcoming.”
During his twenty-five days in a medically induced coma, Sun Ng’s chances of survival dropped along with his health. First, 50 percent, then 30 percent, then, acknowledged in a doctor’s testimony to the court, 10 to 15 percent.
The case appeared to turn on a conversation that Ng’s daughter had with a hospital doctor and that Dr. Ng recounted for the judge in a written statement.
“Dr. Greenhill specifically told me, ‘The situation hasn’t changed. I mean there is nothing, there is nothing different,’” she wrote from notes of their conversation. “Dr. Greenhill specifically told me that my dad ‘has a high risk of dying.’”
“I should be thinking of ‘hospice, transition to comfort care, and end of life care…’” a nurse told Ng’s daughter. She declined that advice.
Instead, on Sunday, a physical therapist visited the Ng home and found the patient stronger than he expected, Dr. Ng said. Her father is lifting his arms and legs and standing momentarily with the help of a walker. She credits the judge’s order.
“I think all the improvement was because of the ivermectin,” she told me. “In three weeks, there was no improvement. They didn’t do anything new. ‘Wait and see,’ those were their words.”
Doctors said the bruises on Ng’s face resulted from his being put in the prone, or stomach-down position, for 18 hours on and 8 hours off for about two weeks, standard hospital treatment to assist respiration.
As Sun Ng hovered “at death’s doorstep,” as his daughter put it, the hospital doctor had suggested that the family should also consider that his international insurance had run out.
“(H)e doesn’t have any more insurance to cover further treatments,” said Dr. Greenhill, as quoted in Trista Ng’s statement. “Since he is not a citizen, he is not eligible for nursing home or other facilities.”
Dr. Pierre Kory is president of the Front Line COVIC-19 Critical Care Alliance and a leading advocate of ivermectin; his work was cited in Trista Ng’s plea for court intervention.
I asked what he thought of that statement. “How a physician could bring up a patient’s ability to pay for care while fighting for their life,” Kory wrote in an email, “is another sign of how much of medicine and many doctors have lost their way, intellectually, morally, and ethically.”
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Said Trista Ng: “We haven’t got the bill yet, but we expect it to be huge. We will seek charity help on the hospital bill. “My dad’s recovery is the first priority at the moment.”
