When Kevin Stewien moved from South Africa to Ireland in 2003, he was pursuing a brighter future for himself as well as his wife and children. He came into this country with a steady job and investments. But today, 10 years later – and four years after Metro Éireann first spoke to him – he has neither.
Stewien, an electrical engineer, relocated to Ireland after being offered what he says was a 10-year contract as a lineman with a subcontracor of the Electricity Supply Board (ESB).
As this paper reported on 30 April 2009, Stewien was injured when a JCB digger struck him in the back after only a few months on the job. He was admitted to a Dublin hospital, where he was diagnosed with a muscle injury and prescribed long-term pain-killers, including oxycontin.
It wasn’t until many years later that he realised he was given more than the legal dosage of the powerful painkillers.
“They administered illegal amounts of morphine, exceeding the prescribed legal dosages,” he says. “They had me on a whole concoction of drugs that would normally kill a man.”
Stewien says the Irish doctors told him he had a muscle injury and not a spinal one. But with no improvement in his condition, he returned to South Africa six weeks later to get a second opinion. The South African doctors administered an MRI and identified his injury as spinal, not muscular.
Yet Stewien had second thoughts, finding it hard to believe the Irish doctor’s diagnosis could have been inaccurate. Plus he says he was eager to return to Ireland, after filing an injury claim with his employer. So he departed South Africa before receiving further treatment.
Homeless and penniless
Upon his return to Ireland, however, Stewien was let go by the company, precipitating a chain of events that rendered him homeless and near penniless, unable to support his family back in South Africa.
Still, Stewien believed that the injury was muscular as per his first diagnosis, and that it would eventually get better. Instead, it grew worse, to the point where he could no longer get around without crutches, then a wheelchair, and eventually was confined to his bed for an extended period of time.
As his condition worsened, Stewien’s wife and children moved to Ireland so that they could be with him. He met with his doctor several times over the course of his injury to discuss various side effects of the drugs he was on, including short-term memory loss and difficulty breathing. During one of the conversations, he asked his doctor about his excess of morphine medication.
“I asked the doctor, if it’s only a muscle injury, why am I on such a big amount of morphine? And the doctor said ‘If that’s the case, we’ll just switch you over to Methadone and if you don’t like that, you can tell me to fuck off.’”
After this incident, Stewien realised that his doctor didn’t have his best intentions at heart, and he began to look at his other options. But when he tried to seek out medical assistance elsewhere, he was met with rejection.
“I went many times [to hospital] as my respiratory tract failed,” he says. “Doctors there once physically abused me while I was totally paralysed. Four of them forcefully removed me and threw me into a wheelchair, telling me that I had to go to [my original hospital].
“Many times I asked for help and assistance and many times I was blatantly refused,” he continues. “Doctors even told patients around me that I was ‘mad’ not ‘mentally of sound mind’. So I had no chance of ever switching doctors or getting second opinions as they just refused all my requests.”
Conflicting information
After seven years of excruciating pain and frustration, Stewien received some unexpected news. During the time he was attempting to find treatment elsewhere, he sent his MRI to other doctors to get a second opinion. All who saw it agreed that there was apparent damage to the spine. However, he says doctors at the original hospital gave him conflicting information.
“It was at the time of their last MRI scan when they finally told me after many years that an operation was not needed, that my spine had all of a sudden returned to normal and that everything was now normal,” he says. “They told me straight up, ‘You can go home and not come back, we will not allow you to come back because the hospital will refuse you access.’”
In 2007, after three years of paralysis and increasing frustration with doctors in Ireland, Stewien went to the UK to seek treatment. He recalls being in the orthopaedic ward of a British hospital, prepped for surgery, when the operating surgeon called Stewien’s Irish doctor.
“He phoned the doctor and came back [saying] ‘We’ve got to get you back, the doctor said don’t touch you, you’re his patient, we’re not to touch you.’”
Exasperated, Stewien says he returned to Ireland and confronted his doctor about preventing the surgery, but the doctor denied that he had ever made such a phone call. In the meantime, Stewien remained paralysed and on huge doses of medication for the next three years.
Seeking justice
There was some light at the end of the tunnel for Stewien in 2010, when he received a substantial sum in an injury settlement with his employer, money he used to pay for surgery in India on his back and neck. Soon after that operation, he says he was able to go off all medication and regained the ability to walk and breathe normally, though his short-term memory is still affected.
In the time since, Stewien and his wife have sent out letters trying to seek justice and help for the years of suffering he claims he experienced. They have contacted the HSE, Taoiseach Enda Kenny, the Minister for Health and Minister for Social Services, receiving some responses but no real support. The couple say all they are seeking is to be reimbursed the money they spent to fix the mistakes Irish doctors made.
“It’s not as if I came here with nothing,” says Stewien. “I am not prepared to walk away and say, ‘Okay guys, you’ve destroyed my family, you’ve destroyed my life, my investments, you’ve destroyed my brain, and now I must walk away with what? Nothing.’”
