Failed Surgeries and Final Accountability

Audible subscribers convente all episodes of Dor. Death, the Cowboy early and ad free Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple podcasts Kathy Monicaco had seen her share of bad backs. She'd worked in medical administration for nearly twenty five years For the last four, she'd worked for Dr. John Schneidder, handling patient requests at his clinic. So when her husband, Russell heard his back lifting a beer keg, Kathy knew he needed to see a doctor According to court documents, she later said, He was in a lot of pain, and I said, it's time to go. We need to get checked out because you can't miss workk Russell was forty seven years old. He and Kathy lived with their two daughters, Mallory and Madison, and their husky, Timba. Russell worked as a machinist and in his spare time coached softball for one of his daughters's teams He'd had trouble with his back before, and Russell wasn't sure about his local surgeon. So Kathy called in a favor. She sent her boss an email It read I know you're busy, and I'm sorry to bother you again. But could you look at my husband's lumbar MRI that was done yesterday Dr. Schnyder got back to her the same day He told her that Russell had three Ruptured discs and would need an operation pretty quickly If they wanted Schneidder to do it, they would have to go all the way to the hospital where he did his surgeries in Cody, Wyoming That was out of their healthcare provider's network She said later, It's worth it in my book to have somebody you trust do the surgery for you versus somebody you don't know We knew if he needed surgery, we wanted Dr. Schneidder to do it Kathy was doing what any wife would do Putting her husband's care in the hands of the doctors she trusted most doctor she worked for She had no way to know that they were walking headlong into a tragedy from which her family would never recover And this time The medical board would finally seek justice M Audible Originals. I'm Laura Bal, and this is Dr. Death cowboy This is episode four Dirty laundry I'm Leon Nefok What happens when only fans becomes more than just a side hustle Only fantasy is an in depth look at the world's newest professional how the rules of human intimacy are being rewritten onine Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or binge all episodes of Only Fantasy, add free, onlyn on Audible I'm Raza Jeoffrey, and in the new season of The Spy Who, we go back in time to meet Benedict Arnold, the spy who betrayed the American Revolution As America fights for freedom from Britain, Arnold emerges as one of the rebels's greatest generals. But when his loyalty is pushed to the limit, he turns spy and devises a plot to shatter the rebellion and make George Washington a prisoner. Follow the spy Wh now, wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also listen to the full season of the spy who betrayed the American Revolution early and ad free on Audible When Kathy and Russell Monico arrived at West Park Hospital, they went to the front desk to be admitted as Dr. Schneidder had told them to Within hours, Russell was on the operating table. Dr. Schneidder performed a spinal laminectomy a removal of part of Russell's spine Afterward, Stidder told him the operation had been a success. Two days later, Russell's condition hadn't improved In fact, he told Kathy that despite taking painkillers, he was hurting more than ever, he'd never felt this much agony She spent a long night watching over him in the hospital In later testimony, she said she hadd never seen him cry And now he was Be of the pain To ease it, Dr. Schneidder's physician assistant wrote an order for a fentanyl patch An extremely powerful opioid many times stronger than morphine. Hatch quickly reduce the pain But it also made his breathing grow slower and shallower By lunchtime, his oxygen levels had plunged dangerously low The nurse was worried about the safety of sending him home without oxygen So she made a call to Dr. Schneider's office He didn't pick up But his physician assistant, Harley Morerell did Later, in a statement, Morll described what happened He said The nurse stated that they wanted to send mr. Monica home on oxygen, and I relayed this information to doror Schneider, who was sitting next to me on his computer doror Schneidder told me to let them know to sit him up and take some deep breaths and that the saturation levels would return to normal Marell says that Schneidder ordered Russell to be sent home as planned out oxygen Instead Kathy and Russell left with opioid and sedative prescriptions Lots of them In addition to the fentanyl patch, Russell was prescribed a daily dose of four valum tablets, six hydromorphone tablets, and twelve tablets of oxycodone Harley Morerell maintained that all the medications were given under quote the direction and supervision of Dr. Schneidder That wasn't the only time Dr. Schneider would be accused of prescribing a large dose of narcotics He was notorious for sending patients home with this cocktail. He would send home volumes of prescription medications. Julie Mossbeacker the self professed battle ax of the nursing station says she saw this kind of thing happen multiple times You know, here's your pharmaceutical bag what you think you need. It wasn't just the quantity of drugs that Dr. Schneider was prescribing But also the combination, which, if taken together, could be dangerous when Steidder was challenged. He would crush you you know, he looks at you like he could shoot daggers at you. And we started empowering some of the other nurses to stand up to him which to say, no, this isn't safe. This is not safe for the patient. Julie says that if things went wrong, doctor Schneidder's physician assistant would take the fall If anything went down, he just blamed Harley Harley did it, not me He didn't talk to me He did it all in his a then one day It was Julie's turn doror Schneider wrote one of her patients a prescription for a combination of sedatives and painkillers To her, the mix was dangerous I said, no I am not going to do that He was angry at me He expected me to follow his orders blindly Julie was convinced it was risky So When I discharged that particular patient, I did not give him that cocktail I refused just let my supervisors and immediates know that I did this and this is why I did it Julie says that she reported her concerns about Dr. Schneider up the chain of command than she waited for a response None ever came, nor did the hospital respond to our requests for comment Dr. Snyder meanwhile told us via his lawyer that He doesn't even remember Julie He says that his practice was always aligned with the highest standards of care. Monacos took Russell's prescriptions and made the long drive home. Waiting for them there was a Russell's mom, who'd been looking after their two daughters. She later testified that he could barely walk or stay awake. He had trouble even getting from the doorway of their family room into a chair That evening, Russell lay in his recliner in the living room as the family ate dinner Before bed, his eldest daughter asked if she could get him anything back, he told her At nine thirty PM, Russell's wife Kathy left him his painkillers She offered to stay with him in the living room, but he told her to get some rest upstairs. Even so, she left a phone next to him and told him to call her if he needed anything at all. The next morning, Kathy checked on her husband. He was in the same position as the night before She said His glasses were sitting on the desk His crutch is sitting there He hadn't moved an inch thenen she saw that he was blue Russell Monico died less than twenty four hours after being discharged from Dr. Schnyder's care A few days later, news reached to the Wyoming Board of Medicine They already had complaints against Dr. Schneyder, the ones from Dr. Noratsky this raised the stakes patient had died as you would imagine, We take fatalities very, very seriously Kevin Bonenblust is the board's executive director You've got a case where there's something egregious happens something that to use the courtroom shocks the conscience. Something needs to happen. The sooner, the better the autopsy left no doubt. Russell Monico had died of a drug overdose To the board, it seemed like Dr. Schneidder was an imminent threat to the public So they suspended his license to practice medicine in Wyoming You don't unring that bell easily All of a sudden you're having a call patient saying, Hey, you know, I do your surgery next week, but the booard of Medicine suspended my license For the first time, Schneidder was barred from seeing patients. hisis career was hanging in the balance which Sneider sidelined They set about investigating just exactly what had gone wrong in Russell Monaco's treatment. They looked at the decision to prescribe Russell a fentanyl patch Fentanyl carries a black box warning. It's the strongest safety alert the Food and Drug Administration can make bx warning on that says, do not give it for postopperative pain It's for long term cancer treatments, things like that. It is not for acute pain. So if you're not paying attention to what the black box warning is That's a pretty good argument that you failed to meet the standard of care The deeper they looked, the worse it got They found that Schneider repeatedly prescribed fentanyl after surgery despite the warnings against that use Then there was the mix of other opioids and sedatives, plus the decision to send Russell home when his oxygen levels had been so low To the Wyoming Board of Medicine, it seemed like they had overwhelming evidence of Dr. Schneidder's wrongdoing We have a silver bullet here I don't know if it's hurting people in surgery or over prescribing or just Whatever If somebody is repeatedly doing that Something needs to happen Schneider's history was catching up with him and not just through the Board of Medicine Remember those mysterious letters that got sent out across the Bighorn Basin Well, the man they targeted had been trying to find out who was behind them And now it found some answers I'm Raza Jeffy, and in the new season of The Spy Wh open the file on Benedict Arnold. y who betrayed the American Revolution America is fighting to free itself from the British Empire And one of its foremost generals is Benedict Ar He's a smugger turned battlefield hero admired for his aggressive tactics But when a war wound, H new wife, debts and politics test his loyalty to the Max. Turn spy and devises a plot to shatter the revolution and help Britain capture rebel commander in chief, General George Washington And that plot would make him the most infamous traitor in US history Follow the Sy Wh now, wherever you listen to podcasts You can also listen to the full season of the spy who betrayed the American Revolution, Ely and ad free on the Audible Dty dor. Jimmy Byiles had been on a quest to figure out who was behind the mysterious letter from Rita. The one that had landed in fourteen thousand mailboxes filled with false allegations against him We did reach out to Dror Biles for this series, but he declined to take part However, we know what happened becausecause Dr. Biles eventually filed a lawsuit that named the supposed perpetrator And that person came out of nowhere. A woman named Lisa who lived fifteen hundred miles away in Indiana But the suit was also clear in saying that although she had paid for the flyer that they believed she was acting on behalf of someone else Journalist CJ. Baker was tracking the story for the local newspaper He couldn't understand what a woman in Indiana had to do with a feud in Wyoming So he gave her a call I said, hey, maybe this is completely random, that you were just named in this suit by this physician over here in Cody. and he's saying that you We're responsible for this mailer. You know anything about it? got anything tellell me about that kind of thing. Jz, I don't have idea what you guys are talking about Eventually, she admitted it to the court She had sent the letters but she insisted she had acted alone Even Lisa's own lawyer struggled to believe her In an email later revealed in court, Lisa's lawyer laid it out for her. He said No nurse in Indiana decides one day to send out a flyer because she does not like the way a doctor is behaving in Wyoming. Unless you are completely crazy, that dog don't hunt. The boat don't float, and that story is not believable Still, she stuck to this implausible alibi until the truth arrived in the form of a flash drive found in the pocket of a pair of unwashed scrubs in the laundry room at the hospital where Dr. Schneider worked It contained pages and pages of letters addressed to Lisa you know, I don't know how much further your jaw could drop or how many more times you can be surprised in the course of a case, but this is one that just seem that Worse and worse Those letters weren't signed, but there was one person they certainly appeared to have been written by Dr. Schnyder. One document read As we have discussed, if you are able to take a bullet, you will be taken care of far in excess of any paycheck And another one said, They will obviously say many times through various ways that it is better for you to tell the truth about your co conspirator Don't believe any of it. They will not befriend you or help you in any way. and as soon as they turn you, you will be treated like a prison bitch doror Biles launched a new lawsuit against Schneyder, accusing him of masterminding the Smear campaign Dr. Schneyder replied that he would fight the case But the evidence kept mounting As the case entered discovery, Dr. Biles got a hold of more damning material email showing that Dr. Schneidder told Lisa she should have a quote two hundred and fifty K plus payoff for her future as well as instructions for how she could avoid answering questions under oath. Dr. Schneidder even offered to help her destroy evidence by giving her hard drives the quote Microwave treatment And yet, Dr. Schneidder continued to insist that he had done nothing wrong To this day, he says he did not quote Direct review or send the flyer to the community But now Stidter was fighting on two fronts The Wyoming Medical Board was questioning whether he was putting patients at risk And the court filings around the Cody Mailings portrayed him as a man willing to intimidate and manipulate to get his way Together, they painted a picture of a doctor who seemed dangerously out of control Still, Schneider kept moving forward. He flew to Nashville and sat through a short course on prescribing medicines and agreed to restrictions on what he was allowed to prescribe That was enough to get his suspension lifted while the Wyoming investigation continued As soon as he got the news, Schneider began firing off tweets to his one single follower Lack in the operating room stamping out disease, communication failure from the physician assistant caused this death, not doctor Eerror These events are orchestrated by our competitor to undermine our vision. We will prevail and provide expert cost effective care Then he settled the case with Jimmy Biles at a cost of nearly three million dollars without admitting any wrongdoing. To pay it, he used his malpractice insurance For years, doctor Schneider had insured himself with his own money. He'd set up an insurance company backed by his personal millions The money was supposed to be fenced off for patients, but instead, he used the funds to pay for the defamation settlement and legal bills. Meaning there wouldn't be enough left to pay out any malpractice claims And with his suspension lifted, he was back in the operating room. Working on patients who had no clue about the kind of trouble he was in sixty three year old Alan Kanope wasn't a new patient He' already been seeing Dr. Schneyder for a while Allan had first become aware of Schneider a few years earlier when he saw a billboard off the highway. He could hardly have missed it. The advertisement was enormous, a giant picture of a doctor in a white coat, beaming down at him I mean, we're talking about something the size of my living room. He had this huge smile on his face The impression that he gave me from the billboard was You can trust me and it said does back surgeries I thought, manan as bad as my back is hurting, and I think I'll go see this guy Schneider operated first on his neck, and that seemed to go well. Then Dr. Snyder operated on Allan's back A spinal fusion Over time, the pain got worse twenty twelve, just months after getting his license back. Dr. Schneidder was telling Allan that he needed a second operation on his back Alan listened, his mind fogged by opioids. I honestly did believe that If he had told me that the moon was made out of cheese, I would have believed that he was tellelling me the truth. Allen agreed, and they scheduled the procedure I remember coming out of the back surgery and being in an excruciating amount of pain where they then put me on even more pain medication I should have never had that second back surgery. Not only did I wish I hadn't had it, I wish I would have died as a result of having had the surgery because I was in too much pain on an ongoing basis After nine months of excruciating pain, Allan finally decided he needed a second opinion He hobbled into a new doctor's office alongside his wife. As he slowly sat down, the doctor began asking questions When did this all start? What's going on It was Dr. Michael Copeland Dr. Schneyder's former colleague He already seen the scans your first thought is Snyder Now, he needed to break the news to Alan My task then was to say You never needed an operation You don't want to hit him over the head with that But at the same time, it's the truth. so you can't really skirt around it put it in terms of I know you're not going to like what I have to tell you, but your back is an absolute train wreck and There's no way to straighten out your back Ecept through the most radical surgery that we can do on a person My wife and I were both kind of just in shock It was just a whole mess to then me say that, o, and you never needed any of that was just too much. When Copeland operated, he says the hardware was unstable from the middle of Allan's back down to his pelvis. He found plastic spacers so loose they could be removed with his fingers One had been hammered so deep between his vertebrae that it was poking into Allan's abdominal cavity dor. Schneider says that Copeland's allegations stem from professional jealousy, and he denies that he was to blame for Allen's failed back fusion Instead, the problem, as Schneider saw it, was the patient himself In his blog, he described Allen as, quote, a drug addicted miscreant whose tobacco and alcohol ruined his spine Allan says that his reliance on prescription painkillers was a result of the complications he'd suffered after dor.or Schneidder's surgeries It was only later that Allan discovered the truth If I had known that he had had his license suspended, I wouldn't have allowed him to do surgery on me also didn't know that the Wyoming Board of Medicine was aware of multiple complaints about Dr. Schneyder I mean, my gosh, you would have thought that The Wyoming Board of Medicine would have stopped him after they had gotten One, if not two cases filed against him if they were really being prudent about what they do too Kevin Bonenblest, the board's executive director We cannot keep them suspended. If we cannot with a straight face, say, There is an imminent threat to public health and safety. And so Thats that's the hard part because to this patient Yeah, he was an imminent threat. When it happens that we have multiple complaints and things like that, what our prosecutor will normally do is he's going to go with the best cases he's got And so What is the ultimate objective Itesn't mean that other complaining patients didn't matter, it doesn't mean that their cases weren't important at all The least The investigators finally brought their case against doctor Schneidder in twenty fourteen, more than two full years after Russell Monaco's death They filed thirty three counts against him for violating the Medical Practice Act, all tied to Russell's case Dr. Schneyder contested the case against him. In his view, the problem lay with his physician assistant, Harley Morell. dor. Schneidder accused Harley of having gone rogue and acting without his knowledge or authority We did reach out to Harley Morrell At first, he was open to an interview, but The next day, he changed his mind because rehashing everything was too upsetting He says Kathy and Russell Monaco were like family, and it makes him shake to think about what happened He told us that he feels deep remorse for Russell's death and wishes that he had done more to stand up to Dr. Schnyder He feels that Dr. Schneidder threw him under the bus to try to protect himself The Board of Medicine did not find Dr. Snneyder's defense persuasive They describeed Schneider's testimony as, quote credible or believable The expert he chose to back him was also considered, quote not credible or worthy of belief In the end of the thirty three counts, twenty nine were upheld The Board of Medicine issued its punishment. It fined Dr. Schneyder and stripped him of his license to practice medicine in the state of Wyoming Snyder was cornered, his business was gone, and more malpractice accusations were stacking up against him He needed to plot his next move So he shifted his remaining assets into trusts and businesses in his wife' and his children's names There was the luxury ranch near Cody known as Whispering Winds a one point nine million dollar home in California and other properties too