Oct. 18—CORNISH — When Lynn Jenkins learned she was pregnant in late August 2022, she and her husband Stephen Jenkins were ready for their first child.
They had been at their home tucked in the rolling hills of Cornish for a couple of years with their two dogs. Lynn, 28, was working 12-hour shifts at Poland Spring. At home, they raised chickens and rabbits.
“My big thing was, I wanted to make sure we had a house. And I wanted to make sure we were debt free. I wanted to make sure that like, when we had a kid, that was going to be our priority,” said Stephen Jenkins, 31.
There were concerns with the pregnancy at first. Lynn had a genetic blood clotting disorder. The blood thinner she relied on wasn’t safe for pregnant women, but her doctor assured her there were other medications she could take, Jenkins said.
Two weeks later, Lynn died of a blood clot in her lungs — the worst possible outcome for her condition when untreated.
Her husband is now suing Southern Maine Health Care, Walgreens and CVS for wrongful death and medical malpractice. He filed the civil complaint in York County Superior Court this month.
The lawsuit alleges that her doctor at SMHC wrote a 30-day prescription that no one could actually fill for a whole month; and the pharmacies didn’t provide her with life-saving emergency medication when that prescription failed — despite the Jenkins’ repeated calls for help.
Spokespeople for CVS and Walgreens declined to comment citing the pending litigation.
Joshua Hadiaris, an attorney for SMHC, said Thursday night that he couldn’t address specific allegations in Jenkins’ complaint because of patient privacy concerns.
But he said the hospital denies “any allegations of negligence or wrongdoing” and “intend to vigorously defend the case.”
Stephen’s attorney, Taylor Asen, said Lynn’s death represents a larger problem within the health care industry; doctors, pharmacists and their employers failed to respond to urgent but simple pleas from a young, pregnant woman with a life-threatening illness.
“She called Walgreens and CVS multiple times throughout the day,” Asen said. “Nobody helped her and it’s such a shame.”
LYNN AND STEPHEN
Lynn grew up in Biddeford and attended Biddeford High School, where she played volleyball and graduated in 2012.
She had two younger siblings whom she adored.
“Lynn would take them to do all kinds of stuff,” Stephen said. “Mini golf, trips to the beach, buy them as much as she could on their birthdays. That’s all she cared about, those kids.”
She and Stephen started dating after they graduated high school. He had been at Thornton Academy in Saco.
They moved in together about a year later and were married the day after Christmas in 2013.
But around the same time, Lynn learned she had a genetic clotting disorder. Stephen said she had been hospitalized when she was 18 for a clot, a traumatizing event that frightened Lynn. She was scared of what the disease would mean for her life moving forward.
It turned out, that with the right blood-thinning medication, things weren’t that different. Over the next decade, she and Stephen lived an adventurous cross-country life, living in Kansas when he was in the Army and briefly in Florida before returning home to Maine.
They spent some time with Lynn’s family before finding their own apartment in Biddeford and eventually bought a home in Cornish in 2020. When they weren’t working, Stephen took Lynn fishing in his little boat. Sometimes they went on dates, other times they stayed home and she watched crime shows.
“I think the hardest part that I’m realizing, is that I’ve basically been living — up until that point — what I would consider a fairy tale, perfect life,” Stephen said. “I’ve got the person that, when I see her, I can taste the next 60 years of my life on your lips. … I know this is what I want, and then it’s like everything I had written for my future is just gone.”
THE PRESCRIPTION
As soon as Lynn discovered she was pregnant, she consulted her doctor.
On Sept. 1, 2022, Dr. Lillian Conover at Southern Maine Health Care prescribed Lynn a month’s worth of enoxaparin to replace the medication she had been taking before her pregnancy, according to the lawsuit.
Enoxaparin comes in prefilled syringes of varying sizes. Conover told Lynn to take half in the morning and half at night. But the syringes auto-lock after one use. They can’t be taken twice, the lawsuit states.
Rachell Pogg, a pharmacist at the Cornish Walgreens, realized this when looking over Lynn’s prescription, according to the complaint. Pogg knew enoxaparin was available in smaller syringes but she never called Conover to suggest a new prescription. Instead, she told Lynn to waste half and come back in a couple of weeks when the syringes ran out.
Neither Pogg nor Conover are defendants in the lawsuit.
But when Lynn called for a refill on Sept. 15, the complaint alleges she received an automated voicemail that the prescription was delayed “because of an insurance issue that we’re still working on.”
“In reality, it is likely that no human being employed by Walgreens knew that Lynn’s prescription was delayed, meaning that no one at Walgreens was ‘working on’ the issue,” the complaint states.
According to the complaint, Pogg later said that she never knew about the delay and if she had, she would have used Walgreen’s emergency policy, which lets pharmacists give people several days of medication on an emergency basis.
With only one dose left, Lynn tried the Biddeford CVS. An on-duty doctor at SMHC wrote Lynn a one-week prescription for a similar medication at the urging of a SMHC medical assistant whom Lynn reached, but CVS said it was out of stock, the lawsuit states.
But CVS didn’t tell Lynn this until the next morning, a Saturday, and “made no attempt to assist Lynn” over the weekend, according to the complaint.
The lawsuit alleges that Conover asked a medical assistant to order a new prescription after consulting Lynn’s insurance, which suggested smaller syringes, but CVS couldn’t send it to Lynn’s home until Sept. 23.
CVS eventually told Lynn to get medication from the hospital. She was without her medicine for four days before she was able to get any by Sept. 20.
Then on the morning of Sept. 22, as she and Stephen were preparing for one of her first pregnancy checkups, Lynn collapsed. She died at the hospital and the medical examiner later determined her cause of death was a bilateral pulmonary emboli.
ACCOUNTABILITY
Stephen remembers shouting at the 911 operator. He said he realized as soon as she fell what had happened, but felt like no one had been listening or acting soon enough.
“I was trying to explain it to them, because at this point, I am certain what’s happening,” he recalled, “because I have enough backlogged information about her symptoms, what she’s doing in front of me right now, and the fact that she didn’t have her medication for four days.”
Two years later, he still feels that he and his wife went unheard by the health care system. He said he is filing his complaint against SMHC and the pharmaceutical companies to get accountability.
Stephen said he’s lucky he had the time and space to grieve and adjust to a life without Lynn — although there’s still signs of her throughout their home. Her pictures hang on the wall, across from a pair of paintings they made during a date at “paint and sip” bar in Portland.
The coop Stephen built for their chickens looms empty at the edge of their yard. Her dog, Riley, trots around where Stephen has begun clearing trees so he can better see the mountains.
What happened to Lynn still bothers him. He said he’s suing for accountability.
“All I can think to myself is, I knew that somebody (messed) up,” he said. “And I was like, ‘I’m not stopping until I get justice for this,’ so I pushed through it.”
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