A GREAT HEART: WHY JESSICA EDDINGS-ROESER IS FIGHTING FOR UVA HEALTH
A poignant and heartbreaking opinion letter about tiny hearts and big love in The Daily Progress.
Jessica Eddings-Roeser has been living a nightmare.
She would have preferred to stay out of the public eye while taking care of her family and being a good member of her church and our community.
But she felt it was wrong to continue to stay silent despite fearing her family would be retaliated against further if she spoke up.
We profoundly admire Jessica’s spirit and encourage everyone who is concerned about UVA Health to read her beautiful and heartbreaking letter she wrote to our Charlottesville community.
We applaud The Daily Progress for publishing opinion letters while continuing to investigate the serious issues at UVA Health and defending their journalists after UVA’s President Jim Ryan publicly attacked their integrity.
Jessica’s letter is an attempt to end the culture of fear and retaliation that some UVA Health leaders have created and UVA President Jim Ryan and UVA board members have defended.
Her letter is a cry for help to end the moral distress our doctors, nurses and hospital staff have experienced due to the actions of some UVA Health leaders and the inactions of UVA’s Board of Visitors.
Meanwhile, UVA’s leaders and their defenders continue to:
• Dismiss the allegations in the 9/5/24 No Confidence Letter as the work of a statistically irrelevant group.
• Doubt the veracity of the Additional Concerns Sent to the UVA Board of Visitors on 9/12/24.
• Ignore our doctor’s requests to the UVA Board of Visitors and Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares to support legal funding to ensure every single doctor, nurse and hospital staff who wants to speak to Williams & Connolly is protected when they tell the truth about UVA Health.
So we ask ourselves…
What if one of our children needed emergency heart surgery to save their life?
Are we willing to accept that our doctors, nurses and hospital staff we may need to trust one day to save our child's life have been silenced, discredited and/or punished by some UVA Health leaders for being courageous enough to call out their conduct and challenge their unethical behavior?
Are we willing to accept some UVA Board of Visitors members and some prominent UVA alums continue to support UVA Health’s leaders which effectively condones and actively enables those leaders’ efforts to discredit, demoralize and retaliate against our doctors, nurses and hospital staff?
THE DAILY PROGRESS OPINION COLUMN BY JESSICA EDDINGS-ROESER
Growing up, my family rarely visited the doctor. My grandmother believed hospitals were full of people who took money from you during your worst moments — institutions that sent large bills after traumatic events. Doctors worked for money, a necessary evil, but were not people to be fully trusted.
My husband, however, survived a congenital heart defect — he received lifesaving surgery as a toddler, and he knows the grace of a doctor’s hands. He’s a cardiac surgeon at the nationally ranked congenital heart program at the University of Virginia. With a specialty in neonates —babies as small as 3 and 4 pounds — he and the team help save lives with surgical repairs just as another surgeon did for him.
Because of their specific skills and the intricacy of their work, these surgeons don’t have a call schedule. My husband works every day unless we are traveling. Sometimes when a child is dying, he is called on vacation. Our children and I continue without him so that other people can live.
Once, after months of pressure from me, he resolved to take a whole day off that was due to him and, as it goes with days off, spent a lovely day at the beach with our family. That day, in my husband’s absence, a baby died. As we drove home from the coast, he received the news. Tears slid down my cheeks as I passed snacks back to my own kids, still alive and hungry, while a distant mother’s child likely had their organs cut out and shipped across the country for transplant.
Earlier this year, there was a communication error with another department and a medication was not released properly from the hospital pharmacy. A baby in the pediatric intensive care unit was dying, and my husband and his team advocated strongly for the child’s life while this other departments scrambled, caught off guard due to short staffing.
I overheard my husband plead with a woman on the phone, begging her to help his patient. Finally, he asked to speak to her supervisor, his tone tensed, though he did not raise his voice. He never yelled, but the urgency was there — the cracks came through. Desperate for this child to live, he needed help. He left our home twice that Sunday to perform risky, lifesaving procedures on the child to extend its life while they waited for the needed medication to be released. The baby lived.
Later, an administrator punished my husband for having an emotional tone during this life-or-death instance. She delayed his promotion, citing him as “unprofessional.” Apparently, regardless of the situation, he isn’t to have feelings. Staff shortages and patient care do not warrant concern.
“How could I do this job and not be emotional?” he asked me. While I have never seen him cry, the bags weigh under his eyes from all night surgeries and his neck aches from bending over the operating table. I usher our children out of the room during phone calls and apologize to neighbors after he’s raced his car down the street to an emergency. I explain why he can’t attend funerals, birthday parties and Christmases. We live knowing that nothing going on in our house, no matter how dire, is as horrific as what his patients’ families experience. Thus, as most medical families do, we carry what little burden we can for our loved ones, so that they can return to the hospital and be told not to be human — told that the very life they bring is not something to be felt personally. Resources withheld, they continue to serve their patients and hold their frustration for fear of retaliation.
Comparatively, for administrators sitting in an office, it might be easier to control one’s tone. There is no blood on the floor. No one nearby is doing compressions on a heart the size of a strawberry. No mother wails by the bedside as nurses pull her out of the way.
Some families go home with miracle children who live and grow. Other parents drive with a vacant car seat in their rearview, arriving only to sob over an empty cradle. Meanwhile, doctors return to their families — forced to choose between the empathy that defines their work or toeing the company line to advance their careers.
Recently, my husband was called once again to a life-or-death situation. It wasn’t his patient, but multiple staff members came to ask for his help. Being a survivor himself, he can’t turn a blind eye — he’s given his life to this work. My husband did everything he could for the patient and is being reprimanded again for notifying administrators of a problem that occurred. Why?
I don’t understand how this can be happening. We live in this community and this is our hospital, too. In my own most frightening moments as both a mother and a patient, the UVa nurses and doctors have cared for us with compassion and skill. Even my husband is a patient at UVa — he still has a heart defect, and he will always need the specialized skills of his colleagues.
Still, we keep it separate. My husband doesn’t share information about his patients, but I imagine that they are just like us. They hold hands and walk their dogs in the rain. They hug their own children and take them to soccer and swim practice. Just like us, they hope that when it’s their turn to need help at the hospital that the staff might be permitted to care and advocate for them, rather than live in fear. They pray the hospital administration would learn that passion for patient care builds trust, that a doctor’s humanity is a grace that gives life, and that having the freedom to speak the truth is what builds a real community.
Jessica Eddings-Roeser is a writer and mother living in Charlottesville. She is married to a congenital heart surgeon and faculty member at the University of Virginia.
What is going on at UVA Health?
We are Concerned Citizens of Charlottesville and Patients of UVA Health who are troubled by what we have heard from many UVA Health professionals over the past year.
These professionals are not only our doctors and nurses but also our friends, family and neighbors. We believe our community should value and protect its health care workers who have dedicated their lives to helping UVA patients.
A Parrhesiastes is someone who speaks the truth in a clear and honest way…
It's about the courage to speak one’s mind even when it's difficult or unpopular…to prioritize truth over social niceties or personal gain...
But speaking the truth can be dangerous. A Parrhesiastes understands this risk and is willing to face the consequences, from social disapproval to vindictive employers or even violence...
Because ultimately Parrhesiastes act out of a sense of duty.
They believe speaking the truth is necessary for the greater good and to protect the people and institution they love.