Darla Mooney Autopsy and Funeral Expenses

So many of y'all have asked how you can help support myself and my family as we work through the loss of my mom, Darla Mooney. This seems like one of the best ways that folks can help. 

The TL;DR is that we need an autopsy because Mom’s caretakers no-call no-showed on Monday, July 20th and then Mom was found dead on Tuesday trying to get something for herself to drink. She wasn’t supposed to be in the kitchen at all. The coroner’s pathologist refused to do an internal autopsy because of mom’s age (57) and that she had hypertension, so he wrote her cause of death as a heart attack based on an external autopsy and Mom’s medical records. Because I want to be able to sleep at night and also because there’s a potential legal case, we need to have a more conclusive internal autopsy done, which is coming directly out of our own, very very empty pockets.
 
More backstory below.
_______________

Mom was under the supervision of a professional group of caregivers who began providing her care on July 2nd. In that time, they communicated clearly to me that they understood my mom to need more care than her allotted hours could provide because my mom was chair bound and unable to prepare her own food or drink. We were working together to develop a roadmap for her care. During their 3 weeks of service, however, the caretakers no-call no-showed 5 separate times with no advanced communication to myself (my mom's medical power of attorney) or Addi that they wouldn't be there, nor any immediate communication that a caretaker hadn’t come in and they couldn’t find someone to cover a shift. The final no-call, no-show for a shift was for Monday, July 20th from 9a-2p, the day before mom was found dead. My mom called Addi (my sibling) at 7:20p the night of the 20th to let them know that the caretakers had never showed up, so Addi had food delivered via a food delivery app. I called my mom for a few minutes that night to ask her to please try to call earlier in the day if there was a no-show situation again in the future so that we could make sure one of us could get out there for her (both myself and Addi live about 3 hours away – which the caretakers knew). The next day, mom was found dead in the kitchen with a cupboard open to get herself some more tea when her caretakers showed up for their final shift. There was a patch of linoleum in the floor that had been worn through and there was a maintenance request with mom's apartment to get that fixed. While Julia, the kids, and I were there on Sunday the 19th, we put a little mat over it because we kept tripping and we felt like it might be helpful to the caretakers, the only ones using the kitchen, to have a mat down to avoid tripping on the hole in the linoleum. We figured that with the care takers showing up within 12 hours of us leaving, they'd be able to determine if that was more helpful than harmful. Mom's walker was found with a bent leg like it had maybe gotten caught on the mat, and mom was found face down lying in the kitchen. There was some blood on the wall that appeared to come from her knee. While she had no lacerations on her head, the position of her fall means that it’s likely she hit her head on her way down and could have had blunt force trauma to her brain that was the cause of her death.

The officer on the scene placed a coroner's hold on mom and requested that an internal autopsy be done because of the nature of the issue. I personally also strongly asked for a full autopsy to be done. Recently, a number of pathologists in the state retired. Additionally, because of the pandemic, there are a lot of pathologists who are not performing autopsies right now. I think this has increased the case load for the available pathologists substantially to the point where the pathologist who looked at mom's case simply pulled her medical records, determined based on her age (57) and the fact that she had hypertension (high blood pressure) that she died from a heart attack. I think because of the general nature of my mom’s health and the case load, that they simply didn’t want to take the time to properly ascertain the cause of my mom’s death. So that leaves the financial burden of a full autopsy on us.

Because mom died clearly trying to take care of herself after a caretaker no-show event, I have also reached out to a qualified attorney who feels that we have a case regarding malpractice if the results of an internal autopsy show that mom died from a cause other than a spontaneous medical event.
I’ve reached out to every pathologist in the state and have finally heard back from one – Dr. Megan Quinn. She is willing to do the autopsy for us, thank goodness. We are just relieved to be able to get some more clear answers.

Mom wanted to be cremated, so we are pursuing that route, and we’ll host a
small, intimate, memorial for my mom more locally, so we are working to keep our costs down. Since Mom was disabled for 20 years, she didn’t really have an estate or any substantially valuable belongings that could be immediately liquidated, so
the financial burden for mom’s funeral falls to my family and Addi (Addi is also
disabled). We’ve already experienced an incredible amount of generosity from
folks – we’ve been given $1,900 simply out of the kindness of people’s hearts.
That will just about cover the cremation costs ($2100).

But we still have around $3,500-$4,000 of autopsy costs to cover.

If we take a legal case on, we’ll likely try to make sure we can win it before we engage a lawyer so we can at least ask for the defendants to cover our legal costs. We’ll likely ask for only a little money for ourselves but will ask for the remaining verdict to go the National MS Society. Any money we don’t use for autopsy will go to the remaining costs of the cremation, her legal case if we pursue it, toward the small celebration of life ceremony, or if there’s money left over after that, we’ll donate it directly to the National MS Society.

Please know that your support during this time has been so monumentally helpful. This year has been terrible for everyone and I know that money is tight, so please don’t feel obligated to give to this cause if you can’t make it work. Your words of support, affirmation, and prayers have been so comforting to my soul.