3 Day Wait in ER for Big Pine Key Woman

For three days, Leslie Deal remained in an emergency room bed at Fishermen's Hospital, in Marathon Florida -- scared, frustrated and in excruciating pain from an uncommon hip socket fracture that had gone untreated.

No doctors in Monroe County could perform the intricate surgery. Worse, workers at Fishermen's Hospital could find no combination of hospital and orthopedic surgeon outside of the Keys that was willing and able to take her case. Kim Bassett, CEO of Fishermen's Hospital, said she tried 15 hospitals -- one as far away as Naples -- and was turned down by all of them.

Tuesday afternoon, Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital -- which Bassett said turned down a transfer at first -- accepted Deal. Around 5 p.m., she was airlifted the approximately 80 miles.

Deal's ordeal began Saturday afternoon. She said she was trying to protect her teenage daughter from a large, belligerent drunken woman in a friend's yard on Big Pine Key. As she intervened, Deal said, the woman fell on top of her, breaking her left foot as well as causing the hip fracture.

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