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Colchester – Local man who survived Eastern Equine Encephalitis and then COVID-19 returned home after more than a year in rehabilitation centers, where he claims he was neglected, abused and forced to attempt to commit suicide.
As of August 2019, Richard Pawulski was a healthy 42-year-old man and successful physiotherapist who had just moved into his dream home in Colchester with his wife, Malgorzata, and their teenage daughter, Amellia. He was working in the yard on a summer day when he was unknowingly bitten by a mosquito carrying the deadly Eastern Equine Encephalitis virus, commonly known as EEE.
Pawulski began to experience flu-like symptoms on August 22 and was quickly taken to hospital, where he fell into a coma that lasted two months.
On October 1, the mystery of what made Pawulski ill was solved, but the prognosis was grim. Pawulski had contracted the EEE virus, which had infected his brain. Doctors said he would probably never wake up. His family was preparing for his funeral.
But miraculously, Pawulski woke up. His occupational therapist called it a “phenomenal miracle”.
Slowly but surely he began to walk and talk again. But he needed months of constant care. He was bedridden in hospitals and rehabilitation centers for 16 months. When he finally got to speak, he said he felt like he had “been through hell” and “wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”
Pawulski was one of four people to contract the EEE virus in 2019 – and he is the only one to survive.
Just before Christmas 2020, Pawulski finally returned home to Colchester and reunited with his wife and daughter.
Although her family are delighted to finally have her home, her return home was not the joyous occasion they expected.
Pawulski was due to be released from Riverside Health and Rehabilitation Center in East Hartford in November, just in time for Thanksgiving, but the process was cut short by bureaucracy with the approval of home health care insurance. His release was delayed and Richard was devastated. He had already spent an entire year away from his family, isolated for months due to the COVID-19 pandemic – also battling and beating the coronavirus last spring – and he was ready to return home.
He wanted to get his life back.
As Pawulski waited for insurance approvals in mid-November and early December, the odds of him coming home before Christmas dwindled, stealing the silver lining Pawulski had left behind.
Then, one night, Pawulski said he was denied the most basic of human decency – the staff responsible for caring for him at Riverside reportedly refused to change his diaper. He repeatedly asked to be changed, not to have to sit uncomfortably in a soiled diaper in order to fall asleep. Staff, he said, laughed at him for his weight and then ignored his calls for help. They had removed his call button, so he couldn’t call for help, and they ordered him to return to his room when he entered the hallway for help. From his room, he could hear them laughing.
And at that point, Pawulski gave up all hope. He said he searched his closet and pulled out a wire hanger. He untwisted the hanger and straightened it. He wrapped it around his neck and tried to end his life.
Pawulski was rescued by a member of staff who eventually acknowledged his first calls for help and he was later transferred to Hartford Hospital. Malgorzata received a call that almost broke her heart – she was told that her husband, so close to coming home, had attempted to kill himself.
Sitting at her house in December, holding her husband’s hand, her eyes filled with tears as her husband remembered the moment he had secured the hanger around her neck.
“He just lost all hope,” she said.
When Malgorzata arrived at Hartford Hospital, she decided she would take him home. He wouldn’t go back to Riverside.
“Why send him back to a place that makes him want to die?” she said.
Pawulski was at Riverside from May to December 2020. During this time he said he was repeatedly neglected, left to sit in dirty diapers for hours and hours, denied access to phones to talk to. her family – even during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when visitors were not allowed. He said he was made fun of by staff members who laughed at him for his weight and told him his wife was going to leave him because of his appearance.
Pawulski said his call button, his only way to signal he needed help while confined to a wheelchair he could barely get into on his own, had been taken away. His family complained that he needed a way to call for help, but it was never returned, they said.
Towards the end of his stay, Pawulski said a male employee who worked evenings started beating him, hitting him in the arms and body. His family still have pictures on their phones of large yellow bruises on his body.
The Riverside administrator did not respond to repeated requests from The Day about Pawulski’s allegations of abuse and neglect.
The Connecticut Department of Public Health is still processing a public records request filed by The Day asking for information on any negligent abuse cases reported to Riverside or to the Salmon Brook Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Glastonbury, where Pawulski was previously located. move to Riverside.
At Salmon Brook, Pawulski said he’s never been physically abused, but just as neglected. The operator of Salmon Brook said she had no comment on her allegations of negligence or abuse.
Throughout 2020, Pawulski’s wife and daughter said they were so desperate that they repeatedly called the police for help and complaining of neglect at both centers. Richard also called the police from the rehabilitation centers, they said.
Lt. Joshua Litwin of the East Hartford Police Department said the department recorded a phone call about Pawulski’s care in Riverside. Litwin said Pawulski’s daughter called East Hartford Police in the fall of 2020, complaining that she could not reach her father. The dispatcher told her that unfortunately it was not a police problem as there was no criminal complaint and suggested that she contact the management of the facility.
Litwin said that in his 20 years in the police service, he had never heard of any criminal complaints regarding Riverside.
Glastonbury Police Department Chief Marshall Porter said his department had no record of phone calls alleging abuse or neglect at Salmon Brook.
Now that Richard is home, his wife and daughter say they are facing a whole new nightmare.
For more than a month, the family has been desperate for state approval to receive home care for Richard, who needs 24-hour care to move, eat and use the bathroom. His wife said they were told the approvals were being delayed because he left his rehab program early. He was brought home early, she said, because he was being treated so badly that he wanted to die.
His wife took extended leave from work at Middlesex Hospital in Middletown. Her colleagues generously donated their paid vacation time to her so that she can take care of her husband.
But they are running out of time and they are frustrated. They said for them it was almost a full-time job trying to work with social workers and state officials to get approval for home care and SNAP benefits to help cover them. their expenses now that they only have one income. Amellia, a 10th grader at Bacon Academy School, often has to leave her virtual classes early, or ignore them altogether, to answer phone calls and help her dad when he needs something.
They call the social workers day in and day out but got no response, no relief.
“My family never asked for help with anything,” Malgorzata said, crying in December. “We have always worked hard and taken care of ourselves, and now when we need help, no one is there for us.”
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