The worst week of Paul Battista and Cheryl Smith’s lives began with a middle-of-the-night text from their daughter.Leah, 20, was in her third year at Queen’s University in Kingston.“My back hurts so much,” she wrote to her mother after midnight on Oct. 26, 2017. “I’m crying. I don’t know what to do. I’m scared.”Smith tried to troubleshoot with her daughter and suggested ways to ease her pain. “Thanks Mom … Wish y were here,” Leah wrote back.The next day Leah struggled to take deep breaths. She spoke to both her parents by phone and said she would make an appointment with the campus doctor.In the morning, Battista and Smith woke to another text from Leah. The pain had gotten worse, so she had gone to the ER with her roommates. But “apparently all is good,” Leah assured them. An x-ray of her chest was normal and the doctors discharged her with Tylenol and Advil.That afternoon Leah was having more trouble breathing. She FaceTimed with her parents and they encouraged her to go back to the ER.“Leah please don’t underreport the pain and difficulty u have been experiencing over the past 12-18 hours,” her father texted after the call. “U need to tell them u r only able to take v shallow breaths without severe pain.”Leah was assessed at the hospital in Kingston and sent home again, this time with a Ventolin inhaler.Neither Battista nor Smith nor the Emergency Room doctors who twice discharged her had any idea that Leah was actually in grave danger. Blood clots, which likely formed in her legs, had traveled to her lungs, restricting her breathing.Two days after her first visit to the ER and 36 hours after her second, Leah again returned to the hospital. This time she was in an ambulance, unconscious. She never woke up.Leah died of a “massive pulmonary embolism” — blood clots in her lungs — according to the coroner’s report.She had ...
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