Nurses criticized for treating gun shot patient badly

ST. PETERS — “It is a good thing that there is a hospital on the French Side of the island or else my parents would have been making arrangements or my funeral,” said Shawn Odonoghue, who was shot following a fight in the St. Peters area on December 2, 2018. “I was taken to the St. Maarten Medical Center with a gunshot wound and was vomiting most of the time and no one came to my assistance.”

He said that he had asked the nurse who was at the hospital to get him something to vomit into but she refused, saying that she did not have anything including napkins.

He pointed out that if they did not transferred him to the hospital in Concordia he would have been dead. He stated that when he reached to the hospital on the French Side the doctors immediately operated on him and took out the bullet that had passed through his abdomen and came out his back.

“The nurses at the Dutch Side hospital did not touch me or asked me anything,” he said. Odonoghue indicated that he does not have health insurance and could not say if it is for that reason the nurses did not attend to him.

He confirmed that he was shot by a man nicknamed “Chucky” who is from St. Kitts and presently in police custody. “I was shot in the stomach and they took out the bullet from my back,” he confirmed.

He explained that even when the ambulance came they handled him “like a sack of potatoes” they took no care with me like a person who was injured.

He is hoping that he does not have to go through the treatment he experienced at the St. Maarten Medical Center again.