We are Meghan and Dr. Abraham Benavides (a first-year resident doctor in Seattle). We need financial assistance to help pay for our medical bills, student loan payments, and housing expenses from Abraham's COVID diagnoses on the frontlines, his long battle with the illness, and our struggle to make ends meet ever since.

Abraham is a frontline resident healthcare worker. He treated a patient on December 9th, 2020. By December 11th, 2020 he was experiencing symptoms of COVID including shortness of breath, loss of smell and taste, and coughing. He took time off of work to get better, but then was pressured repeatedly by the Residents and Attending Doctors to return to work. He did and was still struggling to stand and breathe at the end of the day. His supervising resident gave him a prescription and told him to keep working. He was unable to make it through another day and came home. After repeated pressure to return to work by his program, faculty, and co-residents, he was once again prescribed drugs and told to come back to work.

He took the medicine and tried to go back to "get through another shift" as his residency kept telling us. At the end of this night shift, he was so sick, he couldn't stand or drive himself home. He was wheeled out of the hospital by a co-resident who told me "Don't take him to the Emergency Room." On this advice, I delayed taking him to the hospital for a week until he was even sicker, barely breathing.

When I took him to the emergency room on February 13th, doctors looked at us exasperated and wondered why we hadn't been in the emergency room earlier, he was dying in front of us. They were appalled by his story and got him care. I was not allowed to stay with him. When I called him throughout the next week in his stay, he was still looking sicker. The doctors and nurses put him on transplant steroids to save his life.

On February 17th, my husband showed up at our apartment completely deranged. I could not get him to stay, the drugs and the disease had caused psychosis. No one at the hospital was watching him, they didn't realize he even left the hospital for two hours after he arrived in our apartment. Swedish First Hill Hospital would not help me find him and would not help me coordinate with the police. I tried desperately to find him. I called the hospital many times and each time they denied that he had even been a patient at the hospital. When I did find him, he had spent seven hours on the street with very severe COVID and no jacket in a psychotic state.

Because my husband had left in a psychotic state, he left all of his items at the hospital. I went to pick them up (mainly his emergency inhaler) while he was having trouble breathing. When I got there, again they denied that he had been a patient there. I talked to a manager after manager after supervisor, each one denying he had been a patient at his own hospital. When I finally insisted that I talk to the nurses on the floor, they gave no explanation for why it had taken them two hours to discover that he had gone missing. They still couldn't find his things, mainly his emergency medication.

We are 29 and 30 and I am now his caregiver. He still cannot walk across the room without breathing hard and his heart rate rising dangerously from his now long-haul COVID. At so many points I thought my husband would die, first from COVID in the hospital and then from the negligence of the hospital on the streets. I am so grateful to have my husband alive in my life, but he is physically and emotionally traumatized from this experience. He is not sure he will ever be able to return to medicine. We went from being highly-educated young professionals with a bright future ahead of us to two very sick people, drowning in medical and student loan debt with very little hope for the future.

We have tried to get legal representation, but the truth is every attorney has told us that COVID is too new of an illness and it would be too expensive to try to prosecute the hospital for anyone to accept our case. The hospital refuses to even admit that Abraham had COVID in their billing code (even though it is repeatedly on his medical chart). Because of this, we received no help paying for our hospital or medical bills.

My husband left the hospital on February 14th, 2021. It is now almost August. We have called every office with a phone number at Swedish First Hill Hospital and no one will tell us why it took them two hours to realize he was missing. No one will tell us what even happened to him at the hospital. They have repeatedly cut his pay, even though he got COVID at work and was treated so poorly at work. Even though he has MANY tests and doctor's notes that prove otherwise, the hospital is more interested in saving themselves than in changing his hospital code to COVID so that we could get CARES grant money to pay for medical expenses.

If you can donate to our cause it would be greatly appreciated. If not, we appreciate you getting vaccinated, wearing a mask, and following the CDC guidelines so we can help other frontline healthcare workers go through the hell that we have experienced.