I don’t know the exact words investigators used. The question is not the telling part here; the answer Kristen Parker gave is.
Question: Did you think you were exposing patients to hepatitis C when you swapped your used saline-filled syringes for their pain medication?
Answer: “It didn’t cross my mind at all.” It didn’t cross my mind when I stuck dirty needles into saline solution and drew out 5 ccs. It didn’t cross my mind when I carried the saline-loaded syringe in my scrub pocket around the hospital. It didn’t cross my mind when I spotted a fentanyl-loaded syringe in the operating room and swapped it with my falsely labeled syringe.
It didn’t cross my mind the first time I did it. It didn’t cross my mind the 15 to 20 times I tampered with syringes between January and April 2009. It didn’t cross my mind when I shot up the patients’ medicine in the bathroom. Just a little at a time because, as I told the detective, “I knew my limit. I didn’t want to make it obvious to everyone I was using.”
I figured if the patients were in pain, because, you know, I stole their medicine, the anesthesiologist could take care of that.
I betrayed the people who trusted us with their health. I subjected patients to unnecessary pain. I put the lives of hundreds of people at risk.
It didn’t cross my mind at all.
I’ve written a couple of columns now touching on addiction. You want to know where the line is between compassion and anger when it comes to addicts? That’s it, right there.
Addicts routinely lie, but I believe Parker. From what I read Friday in a Post story by reporters Kevin Vaughan and Greg Griffin, Parker is a case study in denial.
She told police she didn’t know she was infected with hep C. Let’s walk through this: Parker said that while she was living in New Jersey, she was using heroin, sharing needles, from July to September 2008.
By the end of October, she was working at Rose Medical Center. Earlier that month, she had a pre-employment blood screening. The results sent up a red flag for hepatitis C, a reading way above normal. The nurse told Parker to see a doctor. Parker replied that she didn’t have health insurance. The nurse said she gave her information on a free health clinic.
At some point, Parker called her dad, William. He testified this week at her detention hearing that he remembers her saying the nurse told her there might not be anything wrong. “I was under the assumption it wasn’t anything serious.”
Most clear-thinking people would have gone to the clinic. Parker went to work. Within a couple of months, she was swapping saline for a narcotic, according to the police affidavit, “80 to 100 times stronger than morphine.”
“(Seeing a doctor) was in the back of my head,” Parker told police. “I was focused on starting my new job. There was no indication I was sick.”
Such is the power of denial. If addiction narrows the world to the immediate need, denial helps build the walls. It is addiction’s ready accomplice, that which precedes the disease, which accompanies choice on the path to sickness, which, in part, allows that sickness to tighten its grip. Denial makes rationalization possible. It seeds the ground from which selfishness and stupidity sprout. It is the one part of addiction that can be contagious, infecting families, friends. Oh, he’s not that bad. Oh, he’ll get better soon. Oh, that’s not the way he really is.
This is an explanation for behavior, not an excuse. In any case, reason, excuse, both ceased to matter the moment Parker’s personal illness became a public-health threat.
In the conversation we’ve been having about drinking and driving, a reader told me: “When you drive drunk, you’re playing Russian roulette with everyone else’s head. The disease may have put the gun in your hand; it may have spun the cylinder. But you still decide whether or not to pull the trigger. . . . The individual is still responsible for the destruction they leave in their wake, no matter what the disease.”
So it is with Parker. She’s facing federal charges of tampering with a consumer product, creating a counterfeit substance and obtaining a narcotic by deceit. She will face the consequences of the choices she’s admitted she made.
Parker’s friends say she is a good person who long has battled addiction. She, too, insisted upon her basic goodness — “I just do some stupid stuff.” Maybe she was a good person. Maybe she still can be. But the moment she swapped those syringes, what was good in her was consumed by what is sick in her, by what is without mercy, without empathy, without regard for right and wrong. And while she awaits her trial and sentence, several thousand innocent people, possibly exposed to the disease she carries, await their own.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-1416 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
