It was about midnight in June 2022 when police officers showed up at Angela Collier’s door and told her that someone anonymously requested a welfare check because they thought she might have had a miscarriage.
Standing in front of the concrete steps of her home in Midway, Texas, Collier, initially barefoot and wearing a baggy gray T-shirt, told officers she planned to see a doctor in the morning because she had been bleeding.
Police body camera footage obtained by KFF Health News through an open records request shows that the officers then told Collier — who was 29 at the time and enrolled in online classes to study psychology — to turn around.
Instead of taking her to get medical care, they handcuffed and arrested her because she had outstanding warrants in a neighboring county for failing to appear in court to face misdemeanor drug charges three weeks earlier. She had missed that court date, medical records show, because she was at a hospital receiving treatment for pregnancy complications.
Despite her symptoms and being about 13 weeks pregnant, Collier spent the next day and a half in the Walker County Jail, about 80 miles north of Houston. She said her bleeding worsened there and she begged repeatedly for medical attention that she didn’t receive, according to a formal complaint she filed with the Texas Commission on Jail Standards.
Dude, I’m just gonna chime in and say, I’m a critical care nurse and I am 100% NOT qualified to deem a bleeding pregnant woman stable. I’m not OB trained. I have no idea how to assess that.
I have no confidence that a jail nurse would be competent to make that determination either.
There are many different variations on “stable”. I don’t know you, but I haven’t met a critical care nurse who doesn’t recognize a hypotensive and tachycardic patient as unstable. That’s more what I’m getting at with “stable”. Mostly that’s what the management of first trimester bleeds are. Hemodynamic stability from hemorrhage or sepsis from retained products. Those are pretty common for ICU management, but are very rare in first trimester, so you probably haven’t seen a lot of those.
I’m not one to compliment jail nurses and have seen lots of their screw ups.
I would be completely comfortable declaring her unstable if I saw those signs. I would not be comfortable declaring her stable if I didn’t see them because I don’t know what else I should be assessing and I have no experience to guide me in how quickly or not quickly a patient in her condition can decompensate. I think I personally would have defaulted to sending her to an ED for further (and better) evaluation.