WHMP radio personality Chris Collins recovering after near-death ordeal

"Look, I'm not dead," said Chris Collins from his home Tuesday, as he sought to dispel rumors that suggested that very thing. "I'm also not brain-dead, blind, or any of the other things people have heard."

Of course, Collins, 43, who had been WHMP's news and program director since 2001 before his major organs shut down, was at death's door all summer and not expected to pull through. All of it brought on, he said, by a decade of burning candles at both ends and playing "fast and loose with Type 2 diabetes for years. I was riding for a fall."

He also strongly relates to the tail-end of "The Sopranos'" run, where Mob boss Tony, in a coma after being shot by his uncle, goes into this altered state as a harried heating salesman from Arizona, Kevin Finnerty. Collins can tell you about comas.

And talk about a shell of one's former self. In the last six months, between kidney failure, a three-week coma and open heart surgery, Collins has involuntarily shed 116 pounds, which puts him roughly at his 1986 fighting weight of 212, when he was the goalie for Greenfield High's hockey team. Not that he's in any shape to start lacing 'em up and taking his place between the pipes. But he's alive. Which may be some sort of a modern miracle in itself. "My nurses couldn't believe I was alive," he said.

Collins' ordeal began in late March, with intense pain in his back. Since he had been rushed to the hospital 2½ years before with what turned out to be kidney stones, he thought he was in for more of the same. But this time it proved to be a blocked right ureter, which led to a kidney infection. "My kidneys basically stopped functioning," he said. "It came out of the blue - I never saw this happening."

Co-workers at WHMP who saw him taken by ambulance to Cooley Dickinson that morning suspected it was a heart attack.

Renal stents were inserted to allow Collins' kidneys to function. He was sent home to recuperate, but the drug regimen he was prescribed had adverse affects. "I had (the stents) in for three months," he said, "but the bloating - I bloated like a mile-high balloon. Couldn't sleep, could barely walk upstairs; it was obvious that something was wrong. My echocardiogram was high but normal, but my symptoms were not consistent with that," he said.

An ambulance's wail could be heard once again in Collins' ears. "The last thing I remember is being wheeled into the Franklin ER.," said Collins. The paddles of a defibrillator shocked his heart back to life and again when he was rushed to Baystate Medical Center in Springfield. Collins credits cardiologist Mara Slowsky with saving his life. "She saw that my heart was beating at 15 percent capacity. Major blockage. They drained 2 liters of fluid out of my chest."

He went into a coma - from late July to mid-August he was on extreme life support. "I coded three times and three times they brought me back," said Collins. "It was hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute."

Teen gets wish to spend a summer by the lake

Karrie Nichols got her wish this summer to spend every day looking out over Hartwell Lake and casting her rod into its waters.

The 17-year-old West Union resident has the most severe form of spina bifida, a disorder of the spinal cord that has paralyzed her from the waist down since birth.

Since mid-June, she has been living at a new campsite built just for her at the Coneross Campground in Oconee County. Her parents are with her, monitoring her medications and making sure she is comfortable — complications of the disease have caused several infections and kidney stones.

But like any teenager, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers chief ranger Zach Harkness said, Karrie wants a measure of independence.

“We built a concrete pad so she can get around by herself,” Harkness said. “Then there’s a sidewalk to go down to the shoreline. Then we built a fishing bulkhead with rails. She can take herself down there as she pleases.”

And she does.

Karrie is shy, choosing to speak only to those she’s known for a while — especially when she’s not feeling well. She offers an occasional smile and wry look to strangers. Jean Brown, a clinical nurse specialist at the Shriners Hospital of Greenville, said Karrie typically picks one person at the hospital to open up to.

“She’s a funny girl,” Brown said.

Karrie’s father, Ricky Nichols, vouched for his daughter’s catches this summer — mostly bream and a catfish or two.

“The first time she fished, there was something on the line, and she didn’t know it,” he said.

Family members helped net the fish.

Brown recommended Karrie for this special gift from the U.S. Corps of Engineers after the teen spent more than three months in the hospital last spring. She had been on life support after an infection made her ill and her temperature spiked to 105 degrees. Shortly thereafter, she had surgery for kidney stones.

“We didn’t know if we’d lose her,” said Karrie’s mother, Kathy Nichols.

“She didn’t want to eat or drink,” her father said.

The Atlanta-based Children’s Wish Foundation coordinated the details of Karrie’s gift, but the corps took on all the expenses, including giving the campsite free to the Nicholses all summer.

Karrie takes seizure medicines every six hours, and the frequency of her infections has rendered most antibiotics ineffective. She is on oxygen at night. She faces surgery for 11 more kidney stones again this fall, and her father said he knows it could be dangerous.

Spina bifida occurs during a baby’s early development in the womb. The material that will become the baby’s spine does not fully fuse, and the resulting hole exposes the enclosed nerves, said Amanda Darnley, spokeswoman for the Spina Bifida Association. No one knows the exact cause, though it has been linked to a deficiency of folic acid in the mother’s diet.

“We call them $1 million babies,” Darnley said. “The cost to a family or society is about $1 million by the time they reach the age of 10. The cost is overwhelming. Depending on actual conditions, they may face additional surgeries as they get older.”

When Karrie was born, several nerve endings protruded through her back, her father said, and she had a 50 percent chance of survival. Surgery within days of her birth closed the fist-sized wound, but the damage was already done. She’d lost the ability to control her legs.

“They took the feeding tubes off, and she ate. They took the breathing tube off, and she was still breathing,” her father said. “Her doctor couldn’t believe it.”

Her body’s response to the exposed nerves was to create an excess of spinal fluid, which built up in her brain. Doctors inserted a shunt into her head that still drains fluid from her head down to her belly.

After drug thefts from patients, hospitals are working to prevent such crimes, improve safety

Over six months last year, nearly 1,500 pills prescribed to 35 residents of a Sauk Rapids health care facility went missing under nurse Lora Asfeld's watch.

Asfeld later admitted to stealing the drugs, mostly painkillers. She was fired, reported to police and had her license suspended in February by the Minnesota Board of Nursing — one of 13 licensees to be disciplined over a roughly four-month period for stealing pain medication.

While drug thefts have long been an issue in hospitals and nursing homes, top health officials are taking new steps to address the problem. The Minnesota Hospital Association and state Health Department are organizing a coalition of hospitals and licensing boards to identify and close loopholes in drug-handling protocols that make it easier to steal.

"People are starting to realize that this is a serious and ongoing problem," said Keith Berge, who chairs Mayo Clinic's medication diversion prevention committee. "They're starting to recognize what they've been seeing. I think we've been seeing this all along and not recognizing it for what it is."

In perhaps the most dramatic recent case, a nurse anesthetist in Minneapolis was accused of taking most of the painkiller intended for a patient undergoing kidney stone surgery in November. A criminal complaint said the nurse told the patient to "man up" as he endured the worst pain.

Opioid pain relievers like fentanyl or oxycodone are the most commonly stolen prescription drugs, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency. Hospital workers have stolen them by replacing a patient's prescription with ibuprofen, siphoning medication from IV bags, taking leftovers meant for the trash, falsifying patient records and forging prescriptions.

Once someone is addicted to prescription drugs, they'll go to great lengths to get their fix, said Ron Buzzeo, who was deputy director of the DEA's Office of Diversion Control for more than two decades before retiring in 1990. He now consults for hospitals.

"People who are abusing drugs are extremely creative," Buzzeo said. "It's difficult to stay one step ahead of them."

There is no central tracking system for drug theft by medical personnel in Minnesota, and since facilities report incidents to a variety of entities, it's difficult to tell how often it happens. Many facilities don't report all drug thefts to the DEA, despite a federal law requiring that they do, said Jack Henderson, supervisor of the DEA's local diversion group.

Hospitals can be vulnerable if they don't have a thorough tracking system for their medications, ideally an electronic one. Since many drugs stolen are bound for the trash, hospitals should also have a disposal system that includes safeguards such as requiring half-empty bottles or syringes be returned to the pharmacy.

Tracking is generally done through software linked to password-protected medication cabinets called automated dispensing units. That lets facilities check for high-use patterns by a certain employee, or for more complaints of pain than usual from patients who should've received enough medication.

In the past decade, most hospitals in Minnesota have gotten automated dispensing machines. At Hennepin County Medical Center, they look like short, wide vending machines. When a nurse enters his or her password, a list of patients pops up, along with the medications for each. Once a medication is selected, a drawer pops open.

If a drug is packaged in a quantity larger than the patient's dose, the remainder must be thrown away. If it's a narcotic, many hospitals require nurses to have a co-worker verify they watched by typing their password into the machine.

After a 2008 incident in a Mayo hospital in Mankato in which a nurse replaced fentanyl with saline, Mayo Clinic in Rochester formed a committee to improve their protocols. All leftover medication from operating rooms is now collected in a locked drop box that's returned to the pharmacy, which randomly tests them to ensure they weren't diluted, Berge said. That method will soon include all high-use areas.

"This system is expensive, labor-intensive and somewhat cumbersome," Berge said, "but it's the only way you can close the loop on dealing with this problem.'"

In March, St. Cloud Hospital found itself dealing with a rash of unusual infections that it ultimately concluded were caused by a nurse using a syringe to steal painkiller from IV bags. The hospital has taken steps to make that harder, including placing tamper-resistant plastic caps over the ports where medication is added. Plastic bags are placed over the IV bags that can only be removed by perforating them.

High-tech systems such as dispensing machines are expensive. HCMC spent more than $2.5 million on its 80 machines. Smaller hospitals and nursing homes may rely on paper records to spot thefts.

Benedictine Health Systems, a long-term care provider with headquarters in Duluth and Cambridge, typically uses bound notebooks with numbered pages to document medication, and it'd be obvious if a page was missing, said Howard Juni, who provides medications to Benedictine facilities.

Some nursing homes use video cameras. That's how a Burnsville assisted living center caught a health care aide in 2009 stealing OxyContin from an 89-year-old resident and replacing it with ibuprofen. But Juni said placing video cameras in residents' rooms raises privacy issues and can be done only with permission and when there's reason to believe the employee is stealing.

Despite hospitals' best efforts, most experts say it's impossible to eliminate drug theft entirely.

"We could spend an infinite amount of money creating electric fences around these things, and we would still never completely stop the problem," Berge said.