Steve Reiter Talks Loved Ones Dying Alone/Arbitrary Lockdown Rules/Reclaiming Our Human Dignity
In this episode of The Babylon Bee Interview Show, Kyle and Ethan talk to good friend of The Babylon Bee: Steve Reiter. Steve is the host of the Holy Smokes Podcast, which is about a friendship movement of cigar smoking Christians. Steve and his sons were kept apart from his sick wife for several weeks due to the inhumane policy of no visitors whatsoever for hospitalized patients during the pandemic. Steve's wife ended up dying alone. Since then, Steve has founded the Never Alone Project to pass legislation to make sure this doesn't happen again to anyone else ever again. Warning: this episode is a hard story to hear, but, Kyle, Ethan, and Steve are able to find joy and laughter in their fellowship together despite hard times. Read Steve's full story in this piece on The Federalist. In addition to checking out the Never Alone Project, there's a Change.org petition that you can sign. Topics Discussed Steve tells the story of his wife's health and long stay in the hospital alone due to arbitrary rules Our humanity being being both physical and spiritual Steve's efforts in Colorado on a bill to force the issue of at least one screened visitor per day The failure of government and hospital administration at every step leading up to this Steve's advice for anyone stuck in this situation Steve is the host of Holy Smokes Podcast, so he talks a bit about that Steve worked for Dr. James Dobson at Focus On The Family and Ethan seems to have him confused for someone else The Ten Questions
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Ryan Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon B interview show.
All right, we are here at the Babylon B interview show.
I'm Ethan Nicole.
I am Kyle Mann.
And we have Steve Ryder, founder of Holy Smokes.
Are you the founder, Steve, of Holy Smokes?
No, Kay Hidamine.
Kay Hidamini.
The actual founder.
Not founder, but you're just the host of the Holy Smokes podcast.
Okay, Holy Smokes podcast.
We'll talk more about Holy Smokes.
It's a group for cigar smoke Christians.
You're the good-looking mascot of the group.
And also, Steve worked for Focus on the Family for how long?
Many years?
12 and a half years.
And then I worked two and a half years for Dobson at Family Talk.
Okay.
So we're going to talk later about the transition from focus on the family to like focus on the cigars.
Making Christians smoke a bunch of cigars.
Heck yeah.
I'd love to hear about James Dobson rolling in his.
Wait.
Is he dead?
He's not dead.
He's alive.
He's not dead.
No.
That was bad.
Okay.
It does sound like one of those guys that was like a big name.
No, you never hear about him anymore.
But yeah, you heard about him huge in the 80s and 90s and you're like, oh, he's chilling, you know, these days.
He was busy.
Now he's just hanging out.
Dobson probably listens to our podcast and he's like, sure, he does.
Yeah.
Ryan probably does.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Get a good laugh out of that, I guess.
Hopefully.
All right.
Well, fair warning.
This is not going to be your typical Babylon B interview.
We're talking about something very serious today.
This is a sad topic.
We are basically in the midst of COVID-19.
Something that's been bothering, and we've talked a lot about a lot.
You know, how easily people have kind of given up going to church, being together, community, things of the soul.
It's like our, it almost just shows we fully accepted this materialist idea that we don't have souls.
We just need to be well and healthy and like, you know, as long as it's kind of the numbers on paper.
Another thing that falls into that is people who are sick, they're going to the hospital and there's this kind of this blanket rule that families can't go visit their loved ones.
And Steve has witnessed this firsthand.
So I'll let you kind of just give us, you can give us the nutshell version of your story, Steve, and then we can go into a little more detail.
But I'll let you kind of take us and people can kind of know where we're coming from here.
I appreciate you guys having me on because this is going to be a long-term fight for me.
Yeah.
So in mid-March, when I when the whole COVID thing happened, I was in Wisconsin and I flew out there for the boys basketball tournament.
One of my college roommates was the head coach, is the head coach for Stratford High School.
Two years undefeated, the number one seed in all of Division five, I believe.
And so anyway, last year they were undefeated.
I flew out for the state tournament, but unfortunately I got bounced in sectionals.
This year, they had two career thousand point scorers.
His oldest son was first team all conference.
And so I wanted to be out there for sectionals and state.
And so I flew out there.
And the day that I flew out there, the NCAA had postponed the March Madness.
NBA had paused their season.
And when I landed, I wasn't able to go.
I found out it was immediate family only to that game.
So I watched it streaming.
Called, so that night they actually canceled the boys' tournament in Wisconsin.
And that night, my wife called me.
Actually, the next morning, she called me.
And she said, Steve, I'm not feeling good.
I think I might have COVID.
And a friend of ours works for the DOD.
Our sons are best friends.
And the wife was exhibiting COVID symptoms.
And so my wife said, hey, can you come home early from this trip?
I really am not feeling well.
So I came home and my wife has had massive health issues our entire marriage.
Lupus, rheumatoid arthritis.
And she ended up in 2014, ended up spending five weeks in the hospital, two weeks with a massive lupus flare-up.
And then three weeks at the end of the year with ultimately being diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension.
For those that don't know, pulmonary hypertension is basically the heart's pumping blood into the lungs.
The lungs aren't taking the blood as quickly as the heart is pumping it in.
So you get that back pressure that causes the right side of the heart to enlarge and start to fail.
So when she went in in 2014, in November of 2014, before Thanksgiving, her heart was significantly enlarged and failing congestively.
The doctors, when she went in, they said it's an end-of-life kind of situation.
And they actually told me, Dr. Battish pulled me aside and he said, Steve, I don't want to be the bearer.
Dr. Badish is the head of pulmonary at University of Colorado Hospital and Schutz up in Aurora suburb of Denver.
I actually lived in Aurora.
Side note.
Oh, no, I lived in Watkins in a trailer park in Watkins.
Ah, okay.
And so many trips up there, many, many trips up there to that hospital.
And so anyway, I, when she was diagnosed with the pulmonary hypertension, Dr. Battish, who the nurse has told me is a world-renowned pulmonary expert, he pulled me aside and he said, Steve, I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but there's a very real possibility your wife won't be around to see your youngest graduate high school.
He went on to explain two things.
Number one, eventually the pulmonary meds stop working because they increase the meds, increase the meds, increase the meds until there's no benefit.
And then eventually the pulmonary hypertension just takes over and it's a slow, slow death.
And he said the other way is because she has a Hickman line going into her chest that's pumping in the meds to help manage the pulmonary hypertension, there's a significant infection risk.
And so he said, on average, pulmonary pH patients get one infection a year.
And so I made it a goal to really try and really, really try and really take extra care of my wife.
So with that, all those health risks, we were taking this thought that she could have COVID very seriously.
So I flew back.
And over the course of the next seven weeks, she got tested, came back negative.
Her doctor wouldn't see her.
It was all virtual visits.
And on April 29th, she was up and down the entire seven weeks.
And on April 29th, she started vomiting at about four in the morning and couldn't keep anything down.
So we finally decided now's the time to go to the hospital.
We called the hospital, we called the ambulance.
They came, picked her up, and ended up quickly transferring here in Colorado Springs, where I live, up to Denver to the University of Colorado Hospital, where her pulmonary doctors are.
And the day that she got up there, she got retested for COVID.
It was again negative.
And I got tested that day and I was also negative.
And so I thought, okay, cool.
Hey, I mean, I'm negative.
She's negative.
They're going to let me in.
No, they told me no visitors.
And so that was Thursday when I got my negative back.
Friday, I called the hospital and tried getting a hold of the hospital CEO.
And you even thought for a moment that they would say no visitors when you went up to the, I assume it would have just been on your mind that like, oh yeah, I'm going in with her.
So I thought there was a chance.
Okay.
So you had heard, I had heard, and that's the reason why she didn't go to the hospital.
She didn't go get more medical attention suit.
Her doctor wouldn't see her.
And ultimately, she was diagnosed with pneumonia and a blood infection.
And you can't diagnose pneumonia over a virtual visit.
Yeah.
And so anyway, I found out that I wasn't allowed to be there.
Hopefully they were changing the policies soon that would allow me to go up there.
And in fact, the next week, one of the major hospitals here in Colorado Springs was allowing one screened visitor per patient per day.
I thought, okay, all right.
I mean, and in fact, later that week, University, UCH, University of Colorado Health, which is the big conglomerate here in Colorado, they were allowing visitors into all their hospitals except University of Colorado Hospital and Schutz, and I believe it was Fort Collins.
So she went in on April 29th.
On the 30th, I got my negative COVID test back.
On May 1st, I called the hospital.
One of my clients told me, he said, Steve, I just got off the phone with someone who was very involved in the Memorial Hospital UCH merger.
He says to call UCH CEO, Elizabeth Concordia.
He says to call University of Colorado Hospital CEO, Christopher Gessner, and to call the head of nursing over UCH and ask for an exception.
Their offices wouldn't take my call.
The hospital said the only two places, only two people that you can talk to are a patient advocate and the head nurse on her floor.
I talked to a head nurse.
I said, I'm negative for COVID.
Can I be let in?
No.
The only exceptions we are making are for imminent death.
And I said, well, the first night my wife was there, she got this antibiotic and had massive diarrhea, really dehydrated, and thought she told me that morning she actually thought she was going to choke to death on her own phlegm.
Does that not count as Something?
No.
But I have personal protective equipment.
I have masks, gloves that I use to change her Hickman line, the bandage over her Hickman line.
And I can, I've, I've reduced her risk, her, her infection risk by 66%, according to her pulmonary doctor.
Does that not count for anything?
No.
What if I buy even more advanced PPE?
You know, a more advanced mask, a friggin hazmat suit.
I'll go, I'll do whatever.
I'll pay whatever is needed so that way I can be with my wife.
Because in 2014, when she went in for that congestive heart failure, she made it out.
And the doctors called it an end-of-life kind of situation.
When she went in, it was that serious.
And because we had someone, because my mother-in-law and I were running 24, 48-hour shifts where I was going up for a day or two, my mother-in-law was coming in and we were trading off, speaking life, holding her hand, rubbing her feet, giving her that support that she needed.
She made it out.
And I believe that us being there is going to be a key in order to get her out healthy.
No.
Every, every yes, yes, yes.
I was asking, asking, asking.
I was getting no, no, no.
So I got a call back the next week from the patient advocate.
And really, he was just an advocate for the hospital.
I assume that they were probably overrun with people trying to get in.
And I got this.
It was an insulting, really insulting conversation.
So I started to post on social media and I started to do local interviews.
And I started to get some interviews with some papers here in Colorado and start to exert some pressure on the hospital publicly in order to try and get in.
And the next week, the head of infectious disease walked into my room, walked into Elizabeth's room and basically inserted herself into my wife's case.
She's like, I'm Dr. whatever and head of infectious disease.
I'm here because you have a blood infection that we're trying to isolate.
We're trying to figure out the best antibiotics to get this under control.
Let's take care of this.
And the next day she walked into my wife's room and she was like, oh, Elizabeth Ryder, is your husband happen to be Steve Ryder?
Oh, okay.
His name is on my desk.
She basically, I believe, was trying to pacify my wife and trying to get her to get me to quiet down and not be so public about my attempts at trying to get into the hospital.
Fast forward to the Friday before Mother's Day.
I was picking up my mom from the airport in Denver in the hospital, University of Colorado Hospital is right on the way to get to DIA.
And so anyway, the boys and I left early and we got some Euros at a Euro place and parked outside the hospital and had a FaceTime dinner with my wife while she was there in the hospital.
At this point, she had been in there for, I believe it was nine days.
And so we had dinner and then her nurse helped get her out of the bed, walk her to the window, flash the lights in her room so we could see what room she was in.
We flashed our lights and kind of she got super, super, super emotional afterwards because we were so close, but yet not allowed in there.
Yeah.
Can't imagine.
That night at 2 a.m., I got a call from the hospital that she started bleeding in one of her lungs and she was being moved to ICU.
They told me, Don't come up.
She's going to ICU, but don't come up.
It's very, very serious, but it's, but she's stable.
5:30 in the morning, I got another call back saying, We think we've stabilized the bleed.
It's still very serious.
We'll keep you posted.
Don't come up.
And so she was in ICU, I believe, for nine days.
And I wasn't allowed to be up there, wasn't allowed to go see her, constantly given, you know, reasons.
We might be changing the policy on Tuesday.
No, they didn't change the policy.
And so you can't even see her in the window now that she's in ICU, huh?
No.
Yeah.
And so anyway, on Mother's Day, I called her and we had this FaceTime call, and I could not get her to smile at all.
We've always had a marriage where I could always get her to smile.
She's very optimistic, very upbeat, always made the best of a situation.
Those days that she was in the hospital, she made the best of that situation.
And she constantly told me, Steve, I don't know what's going on here, but God's doing something.
We need just keep fighting, keep trying to get in, but don't kill yourself over this.
I see God's doing some stuff here at the hospital that I don't understand.
And so Sunday, we have this conversation on Mother's Day, and I can't get her to smile at all.
Every trick that I, that, that, that I have done over the years in order to get her to smile, she never once cracked a smile.
And our conversation actually turned to what if this is the one you don't come home from?
And I told her, babe, as hard as this is going to be, if you don't make it home, I promise you, we'll be okay.
It'll take a long time.
It'll hurt like hell.
I promise you, we'll be okay.
Those aren't the kind of conversations you should have over FaceTime.
Those are the conversations you should have in person.
She started to rebound and I cratered emotionally because at that point, it was clear I wasn't getting in there.
It was clear that I was losing this battle.
And on Tuesday, May 12th, I want to say, she had this experience with God that she couldn't really put it into very many words.
She tried explaining it to me.
She explained a little bit to her mom.
She explained a little bit to our pastor.
But that night, she said this nurse came in and just started praying over her.
And she went into this trance or sleep.
She doesn't know what it was.
And she said, Steve, I wasn't in heaven and I wasn't in my body, but I was communing with God.
And I wasn't verbally talking, but I was hearing God in my spirit.
And the conversation was, it was amazing.
And she said, God was like pulling stuff out of my body and doing stuff with me.
And the nurse that night actually said, you know, that Elizabeth was kind of writhing around in pain, like she was wrestling over stuff.
And so she told me that on Wednesday, the 13th, I believe.
And at that point, like I said, I cratered emotionally.
And she was like, I don't get, why can't you be happy for me?
And I'm like, I am, but right now I'm just still processing all of this.
She finished out that week, started to rebound more and more and more.
And the doctors on Friday started talking about, hey, we're going to release you next week.
You'll be able to go home.
Now, because of the bleeding in the lung, because of the lupus and the rheumatoid arthritis, she was on blood thinners.
She's been on blood thinners for years.
And so in order to stop the bleeding in her lung, they had to give her a coagulant, which made her very much at risk of a blood clot.
And they knew about that risk and they were scanning her like crazy, trying to find any blood clots.
At one point, they found a mass in her heart that looked like a clot, could be a clot.
And so they upped her blood thinners to try and to dissolve that clot.
And so there was a significant risk of a clot.
And on Monday, they said, okay, it looks like Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday is when you'll come home the 18th, Monday, May 18th.
And on Tuesday, it was looking like she was going to come home on Wednesday, the 20th.
And we had a phone conversation at about 4.10.
And it was all about a FaceTime conversation.
And it was all about, okay, you're coming home probably tomorrow.
What do you want for dinners?
What do you want?
Your mom's going to come down this day.
We're going to make sure that a friend comes over on this day and this day and this day.
So that way you're getting this, everything you haven't been able to get in the hospital, you're getting here at home.
It was a short 10-minute conversation, hung up.
And 40 minutes later, I got a call from the hospital.
As soon as I saw it was the hospital, I thought, hey, cool.
All right.
It's details about picking her up tomorrow.
And I got a call that your wife's gone into cardiac arrest.
Get up here now.
Takes me an hour and a half to get up to that hospital.
And I jumped in our vehicle.
And as soon as they called, I turned to my mom and the boys and I said, your mother's gone into cardiac arrest.
Start praying.
Jump into the car and I start driving.
I start making calls and texts.
How far away are you?
Hour and a half.
Hour and a half.
That has to feel like the longest hour and a half in the world.
It was, it was, well, I was making phone call after phone call after phone call.
I called some guys from Holy Smokes.
I called a very dear friend and client.
I called my pastor.
I called my college roommates.
I called, started calling her family and letting them know.
And about 20 minutes in the drive, I called the hospital, got a hold of someone on the floor, and they said they're still doing CPR.
And it was at that point I knew I probably wasn't going to see my wife alive again.
Had some quiet time, really just driving, almost numb, almost in autopilot on my way up to the hospital.
And called again as I was approaching South Denver, Lone Tree, Greenwood Village.
And I called the hospital one more time.
And that's the point at which her pulmonary doctor said, I'm sorry, Steve, we weren't able to save her.
So I get to the hospital.
And a buddy of mine, John Ramsted, decorated Navy fighter pilot, actually got orders to go to Top Gun.
But a softball injury derailed his career.
He met me at the hospital.
And when I got up to her room, it was just absolutely one.
When I got to the hospital, no one ever asked me to put on a mask.
No one ever handed me a mask.
No one told me a mask was required.
They just walked me up to her room.
When I got up there, it was absolutely guttural.
It was weeping like I've never wept before in my life.
I bet.
And it's about 15 minutes of that.
Then her doctor came in and said some really nice things about her.
And I thanked him.
I thanked him because she could have died five and a half years ago when she was in with the congestive heart failure and pulmonary hypertension when that was diagnosed.
And I said, thank you for the last five and a half years because we got to do some amazing things over the last five and a half years.
We've done some really cool road trips as a family.
In December, we took basically the month of December off and went to Australia for over three weeks, got this Airbnb right on the Indian Ocean, fell asleep listening to the waves.
My brother lives in Western Australia, and it was absolutely amazing.
It was just an absolutely glorious trip.
And those are memories that the boys and I will have for the rest of our lives.
Christmas morning, waking up, body surfing, and going and opening presents and then going back out to the beach.
I'm a huge fan of summer Christmas.
A huge fan of summer Christmas.
Oh, yeah.
I heard Australia is the best place.
That's like their summer, right?
Christmas time?
Yeah, it is.
It is.
That's cool.
So you've gone through this gauntlet.
You've come to this end of it.
And now I assume that there is a reaction that begins to build up inside you towards hospital.
Whoever's making these decisions to, you know, they let you walk right in without a mask at the very point where you need it at least, right?
I mean, you would have given anything for it 10 minutes before that, even, you know.
So what kind of starts flooding in to your head and heart and just used from that point?
So on the walk out of the hospital, after I picked up her stuff and the chaplain escorted us out, on that ground floor, gentlemen, more than half the doctors, nurses, and staff, janitors, were not wearing masks, to which the next morning is when that really hit me.
Because if this was really, I try not to take a position on masks and the response, but if this was really that serious, why were these doctors, nurses, and janitors not wearing masks on that ground floor?
Yeah, so serious.
You're separating a husband and his den children from their mother.
Yes.
On her deathbed.
But the masks are optional.
I had plan.
If it was one screened visitor per patient per day, I had a plan where one day I was going to go, one day my mother-in-law was going to go.
Day.
Matthew, our oldest, was going to go, then Caleb, and then one of Elizabeth's friends, then I was going to go.
So that way she was getting different people that were just rubbing her feet, holding her hand, laying next to her, hanging out with her, those kinds of things.
And so the next, I was numb, completely and totally numb that first week.
I bet, yeah.
And in such pain.
In fact, the five weeks after she died, I lost 20 plus pounds.
And you're a skinny guy.
I'm a lean dude.
I'm a little bit lean.
It was all monkey.
I see most humans as skinny because you've seen me.
It's all relative in comparison.
Yeah.
And so anyway, I started to do some media appearances.
I started to do some interviews.
And this idea of we need to have legislation and protections in place to allow, no matter the pandemic, to allow one screen visitor per patient per day.
We need to have national stockpiles of personal protective equipment.
We need to be working with, we need better planning because if the head of infectious disease called my mother-in-law, my mother-in-law and her had a conversation.
And my mother-in-law said, well, if what was the reason you didn't let us in?
Well, we didn't have enough personal, we didn't have enough PPE for visitors as well as doctors.
Well, why didn't you let us in?
Because we had the PPE.
Well, yeah, that wasn't an option.
Which, I mean, the circular logic that I have run into on this is appalling.
AARP did a study that equated loneliness to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
And if that's the case, my wife smoked 315 in the 21 days that she was there at University of Colorado Hospital and Schutz campus in Aurora.
She smoked 315 cigarettes of loneliness, and that did not help the situation.
I will go to my grave believing that had we been allowed in, even a weekend, she wouldn't have gone into ICU.
She wouldn't have had the bleeding in her lungs.
She wouldn't have and ultimately what took her out was a clot hit her lung and pulmonary embolism.
That's really what took her out.
And she showed a lot of significant, the autopsy showed a lot of significant decline in organs.
So that 21 days that she was there alone was significantly a detriment to her health, even though she made the best of it, even though she did what she could.
And we talked multiple, multiple times a day on FaceTime.
But FaceTime doesn't cut that personal rubbing feet, holding hands, speaking life, those kinds of things.
I mean, simply to have your family taken away from you and just to go sit in a room with a TV in it and some people who bring you bad food now and then and you weren't sick and you weren't on your deathbed, you just suddenly your life is switched to that for like, was it two or three weeks or however long it was?
That would be a shock to somebody's system that would send them into a depression.
I mean, just that.
Because to lose that human contact and connection to your loved ones, it already would be a form of torture.
I had pneumonia when I was 12 years old, and I was in the hospital for about a week.
And I remember just at that age, the lonely, dark, the feeling when my mom, once she, I remember my mom left, I would sit there and I would, you know, she said I made it so hard for her to leave.
I would sit there in the window and watch her leave because I just hated being alone in this place where for me, I'm a kid, but, you know, it's just people are coming and sticking me with needles all night long and it's just dark and really all I have is the TV.
And I wanted to have you on because I think it's easy when you're not, you don't have somebody in the hospital.
You don't have somebody, you're not going through this.
You just hear them say, no visitors.
And that sounds so simple.
But when you hear the real story of what that looks like, the effect it has not only on the patient, but on the family, it makes you start to go, have we lost our sense of humanity here, like of soul, like the idea that there's something more to people than just fixing mechanisms in a room with, you know, whatever, whatever the doctors use, their little tools.
I mean, you know, wrenches, hammers.
Yeah.
There's a balance between, there's a balance between protecting the other doctors, nurses, staff and giving the individual what they need.
And we did a great job of, in many hospitals, they did a great job of protecting the doctors, nurses, other patients, et cetera.
But the individuals are dying alone still in many hospitals across this nation.
When I, about a few days after she died, one of my former editors at Family Talk, her husband died a few years ago, and she invited me to this Facebook group called Young Widowed with Young Children.
And I joined, I shared my story.
And within 24 hours, guys, more than a dozen people, dozen lost, chimed in and said, I lost my spouse too.
I wasn't able to say goodbye.
This is across the nation.
I saw on Twitter a story of a mom whose eight-year-old son was in the ER.
She didn't say why he was in the ER, but he was in the ER multiple hours.
The mom wasn't allowed to be with him.
That's crazy.
And they wouldn't even allow the kid to have his teddy bear.
Wow.
And here's that.
Here's my when I ask medical professionals this, I say, what kinds of fear is this kid going to have over seeing the doctor or going to a hospital for the rest of his life, possibly, unless he gets, you know, counseling, PTSD, trauma, so that way he works through this?
I mean, he could be 40 years old and die of a heart attack because he was like, yeah, I'm just not going to, I'm feeling something weird, but I'm not going to go to the hospital.
I'm feeling this pain here in my lungs.
Oh, it's a cancerous nodule that all of a sudden it's too late, that he's too late to go to go see to go to a doctor.
And so, yeah, I've created a nonprofit called the Never Alone Project.
And the goal is to push for comprehensive legislation that protects the patient's right to give one screen visitor per patient per day.
This has clearly been a failure of the industry, American industry, of the healthcare system, and government.
All three levels have failed because we used to have national stockpiles of PPE that went away, lost funding under our last administration.
Did the hospitals not see this coming?
Hospitals.
Did they not see this coming with swine flu, with bird flu, with SARS?
They knew something like this could happen.
And the hospitals really need to be held accountable for forcing people to be alone for as long as they have, die alone, those kinds of things.
And industry really needs to step up and bring some manufacturing of essential stuff back here.
We need better masks.
We need better, more protective equipment.
So that way we can more easily let in these screened visitors that don't pose a health risk to those doctors and nurses and staff.
This whole thing feels very, the way that you're describing, when you're trying to see your wife, it feels very bureaucratic.
It was unbelievable.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Like how arbitrary it is.
And that's what a lot of us have criticized about all the restrictions and stuff is not necessarily that there are restrictions, but that they do seem so arbitrary.
We see people protesting in the streets and it's fine.
But my church can't get together and sing.
And you have people walking around without masks in the hospital, but you can't see your wife even one-on-one with protective equipment and such.
So where is this coming from?
Does it feel like it was coming from, you know, are individual hospitals setting these mandates?
Is this bureaucracy coming from the states or local government?
Or what's the biggest barrier to who's the authority saying no visitors?
Is it each individual hospital?
So at the University, at UCH, University of Colorado Hospital and Schutz, from what I was told, it was a team of doctors and experts, of which the head of infectious disease was probably the main person that made the decision.
And because she inserted herself into my wife's case, she gave Elizabeth her cell phone, and Elizabeth and Dr. Barron texted back and forth.
And it got to the point where the week that my wife died, I texted Dr. Barron and I asked for an exception.
I said, I basically, yeah, I said I logged into my wife's computer, got the phone number, and then texted her.
And I basically begged and pleaded.
And I said, please make an exception.
Actually, it was the week before.
It was the week before because we had, when Elizabeth found out that I did that, she was unbelievably mad at me.
I mean, it was their last fight.
It was our last fight, a week before she died.
And I was unapologetic in terms of going in and doing it.
But I said, I'm sorry that I didn't tell you before I sent the text.
And I'm sorry that the way in which you found out, she found out while my boys and I were playing cards with my mom at the table.
She's like, I should have told you privately.
And so I got this reply back the next day from Dr. Barron.
I admire your tenacity.
your love for your wife is very apparent, but I can't make an exception.
Like I said, there's a balance between protecting the collective and giving the individual what they need.
And they were so focused on protecting everyone else that the individuals have been left to wither on the vine.
And if the whole point of a hospital is to help heal people and get them home, you would think that having a loved one that has been screened that has PPE would be allowed in.
And they refused, they refused, they refused.
Yeah, it sounded like letting someone in under those conditions would actually increase risk.
I mean, they have janitors, they have cafeteria workers, they have plenty of people that are getting in and working who they've deemed essential to be in that person's presence.
How is it not that at least one family member at a time isn't deemed essential?
I mean, what?
I don't know.
It's just shocking to me that there's human beings that think that's a way to have somebody be at the worst moments of their life to just remove all loved ones from them and to act as if screen time really helps, like is a good replacement for it.
My wife's a nurse.
She said that nurses are becoming iPad holders.
They're just, you know, for people who are on their deathbed, they're sitting there holding iPads so they can talk to their loved ones.
It's like.
I have a friend of mine whose aunt broke her femur a few weeks ago and elderly.
And one of her daughters is an RN.
And at this hospital in Greeley, this RN daughter was only allowed in 90 minutes.
And during that 90 minutes, she was like, my mom is not being properly taken care of.
Her pain meds are not being, she's not getting rolled over enough.
Yada.
Patients need advocates.
Right.
That's the other thing, too.
Who knows your wife and her condition better than you?
And how are you not in there to talk about when they're going, you know, that's the thing you feel that when you're in the hospital, the doctor comes walking in.
He's been dealt with however many different people in different situations and he's trying to just jump in on it and make decisions.
It's like you need somebody there who has been down the road and can like has been there, especially if she's asleep or like she can't talk.
It just seems insane to me that they would think that's not essential.
No, so my Colorado state representative, Tim Geithner, found out about this story.
Two days after Elizabeth died, the Colorado Sun ran an article and it made its rounds through the Colorado Senate and House.
And my representative called me right at the end as they were getting ready to close up the state session.
And he said, I want to push through a bill that basically forces hospitals to allow one screen visitor per patient per day.
Can you come and testify?
I said, absolutely, I'll do that.
And so I went up to Denver and a few days later, testified before this committee.
And the day that I went, I'd found out that the Colorado Hospital Association, who helped draft the bill, did a strikethrough and basically right before right before it went to committee that basically turned it from a requirement to a suggestion that hospitals do this.
So the bill really had no teeth.
They asked me to go up and testify.
And I testified and only two Democrats voted no.
And because the Colorado State House and Senate are Democrat-controlled and we have a Democrat governor, I thought, okay, cool, this is going to breeze through the House.
17 people voted.
It passed, but 17 House members voted no on that bill, including a number of those committee members that were Democrats.
And it was every Democrat, every single of the 17 no votes were Democrats.
So the no vote would be no, you can't do the visitor, no enforce visitors, right?
Is that what that means?
No to even this suggestion to hospitals that really has no teeth.
Yeah, that's so weird, not even to suggest.
Okay.
And so anyway, it passed the Senate unanimously.
And I was supposed, the boys and I were supposed to meet with Governor Polis, Colorado's governor, and do it over Skype.
And then there was supposed to be a public signing.
We found out a few weeks ago that the governor quietly signed it.
And I have yet to, the boys and I have yet to meet with the governor as promised.
And so from everything I can tell, the hospital association, the Colorado Hospital Association, has done their best to put the kibosh on my story being told because it puts them in a bad light.
So it sounds like the bill was more of a virtue signal, like, oh, yeah, we intend to do good things.
It really changed nothing, right?
That's exactly.
That's exactly what it was.
Now, fortunately, the University of Colorado Hospital started letting in some visitors and just a couple days before it passed the Senate.
So once it passed the Senate, okay, all of a sudden, now this is really a non-issue.
Okay, we're letting people in.
We're letting some people in.
So Tim Geithner and I drove up to Denver because the governor signed this privately and didn't do any kind of public signing.
We were like, we need to get in front of the governor and we need to basically let him know our displeasure, let him know that I had hoped for more from him.
And so we went to one of his COVID-19 press briefings.
And I showed up with a picture of my wife, her last picture that she took on Facebook.
And I got a call from his legislative director basically freaking out saying, why are you guys making a scene?
And we're like, we're not making a scene.
All we're trying to do is just get in for, you know, five minutes, three minutes with the governor, whatever we can get before or after this press conference.
And so they quickly ushered us up to the governor's mansion.
And I got three minutes with the governor.
And I basically said, listen, this isn't a partisan issue.
And he said, I completely agree.
I said, I'm looking for champions on both sides that are willing to stand up and fight the hospital association and fight and publicly make this stand to say individuals need someone to hold their hand.
They need someone to rub their back and rub their feet and speak life and have someone there at the hospital because no one, no one, no one should be in the kind of position that I was in.
He said, I completely agree.
Okay, perfect.
So I had a conversation on Monday of this week with his legislative director.
And we're looking at options here in the state as well as nationally.
What would you say to, I mean, we're all, you know, we're all husbands and we got kids.
What would you say to guys like us, you know, just, you know, give us your having, we all fear the day.
My wife is a type one diabetic.
There's always this like fear that if she got COVID, definitely the diabetics are getting hit very hard by it.
But even that, like she, her life depends on this little pump that's stuck to her body.
And you never know if she's going to not have insulin, be stuck somewhere without it, or the simplest thing, like not having some candy around or something could kill her.
It's just, uh, so what is your advice from having gone through this thing that we all know one day we either will have to face or we'll die first?
Uh, what's your what's your advice now having come to the other side of it?
My advice would be: number one, uh, be your biggest advocate, be your spouse's biggest advocate, uh, call the hospital, fight with everything you have in you to get in there.
Um, you wish you had fought harder looking back.
I don't know because I don't, I don't think the hospital was so dead set on not allowing me in.
Yeah, what more could you do?
Like, do you like the children?
Yeah, at that time.
That's John King thing.
You just show up and kiss the doors.
Kick the doors down.
I mean, yeah, I mean, suction cups.
And I had a number of people on social media that told me, Steve, you should show up with a gun and just kind of walk in and with a camera crew behind you.
And I was like, no, at that point, it would be me.
It'd be more about me than it would be about my wife's health.
It would be much more.
And so you scrubs and sneak in.
Yeah, that's something that I actually have a friend who's a nurse.
Her parents live, I used to go to church with her parents.
And they she actually has worked with a lot of COVID patients.
And she told me this story.
She said, Steve, in early May, before we started letting one screen visitor per patient per day come in, I had a patient who looked like she wasn't going to make it through the night.
And I called the daughter and I snuck the daughter in.
And the daughter basically was with mom.
Mom rebounded mom's home and she's alive to this day.
Whereas if this nurse wouldn't have let her in, she might not have, this elderly mom might not have made it through the night.
Yeah, my wife was a hospice nurse.
She said that that's a very real thing.
People, when they lose the will to live, very often that's when they do live and when they do die.
I mean, it's that's very real.
She was on many deathbeds.
And I believe that me not being there, us not being able to go up to her room that Friday before Mother's Day was really what kind of pushed my wife's health over the edge.
Anytime she got really emotional, I could see that it took it took her down health-wise.
And it's something that I've thought a lot about.
Do I regret doing that?
Part of me is yes, and part of me is no, because I knew that she needed to see us.
I knew that she needed to.
We needed to have that time on, you know, since we were so close, it wouldn't have been fair to just drive by.
And so, but as for someone whose spouse could be in the hospital or their mom or their dad or a child and they're unable to see them, my recommendation is just to start to be your biggest advocate and post on social media and start to get garner as much support as you can.
and just try and help publicly share what's going on and share your story.
One of the things with the Never Alone Project that we're looking to do is we're looking to mobilize all of these stories of people who gave birth alone, people whose kids were in the ER alone, people who were in the hospital alone for a long time, and start to exert public pressure on these hospitals to basically shame them,
publicly shame them with some massively bad PR to that they can't fight this push so that way we can get some comprehensive legislation and planning in place so that way we can start patients have the right to one screen visitor per patient per day.
Yeah, it'd be great if Never Alone or if there could be an organization that has their own stockpile of PPE just in case.
You can make donations to that, have that kind of stuff on backup so the hospitals without excuse, you know, that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
Well, we appreciate you telling your story.
Thanks, guys.
So you've got the website, never alonepandemic.org.
Can people donate or support?
Is there a way to do that?
Yes.
Yeah.
So when this airs, I will have the donate button up there.
We just mailed off the 501c3 paperwork to the IRS for approval.
And so I got the bank account set up and we'll have a button on there.
We have the ability for people to share their stories.
We have a Facebook group, Never Alone Project group.
And yeah, the whole idea is for us to start to share our stories, to heal together, and to mobilize.
So that way no one ever goes through the kind of pain that we've gone through.
Everyone, even Dr. Michelle Barron, the person that kept me out of the hospital, even if she is traveling and her husband is in a hospital, even she has the right to go see her husband.
All right.
Well, we definitely want everybody to go to check out that.
And there's a petition here.
I don't know if that's still going on, your change.org petition.
We'll link that in the show notes.
People want to do that.
So we're going to go into our subscriber portion, but I'd love to talk to you about Holy Smokes, maybe how it's helped to, I would like to know, you know, having a group of guys that are, you know, bros when going through this to have, I think, I think a lot of people underestimate how much men need other men.
Without caution.
We'll talk about that and also working at Folks on the Family with the famed Dr. James Dobson.
Talk about how you backslid into cigars and beverage.
And then we'll do our 10 questions, which we stole from you as a concept on your podcast.
Become a Babylon B subscriber.
Help these guys out.
These guys are doing some incredible work.
I'm a proud subscriber, a proud supporter, and love you guys.
And can't wait to get out to California and have another stick with you guys.
Yeah, I'd also like to say for listeners, and you could be male or female, but Holy Smokes obviously has a male leaning to it.
There are women of Holy Smokes and some wives that smoke and stuff.
But as a podcast, I want to say the Holy Smokes podcast, not only are you a professional broadcaster, so it's very well done.
Thank you.
The cool thing about it is, yeah, they're smoking cigars where they do it.
They talk about it a little bit, but it's not really a cigar podcast.
It's just a podcast about fascinating people.
And so you've probably not heard of 90% of the people on the podcast.
You may have heard of some famous people like Kyle Mann or Ethan Nicole, who's interviewed.
Other than, you know, two of my favorites that I've had.
Two of my faves.
But you have some great, I mean, I've discovered, in fact, we had Brett Kunkel and his wife on because I heard them on your podcast.
So I highly recommend it.
It's a great podcast about very real Christian dudes living real life.
It's just a great, very real podcast.
I highly recommend it.
Thank you, Ethan.
HolySmokes.club is the website to learn more about Holy Smokes.
Even if you don't smoke, you probably like it.
No.
And yeah, I mean, we've had some incredible people.
And the next time I'm out there in California, one of those Holy Smokes Orange County guys is a member of the Grand Havana room in Beverly Hills.
And he's been a member there since 1978, I think is what he said.
And so he's had cigars with Milton Burrell and Bob Hope and just these names.
And when he's told me the next time I'm out there, he's a real estate developer.
He's told me next time I'm out there, we're going to go into the Grand Havana room and have a cigar and just watch the big names that go in and out.
Is that like where Arnold smokes or something?
Yeah, whenever he's in Southern California, I'm sure he's there.
All right.
Wow.
All right.
Well, let's go to the subscriber portion.
Let's do it.
Audio is freeloaders.
Goodbye, freeloaders.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
I noticed you cough a lot.
Is that the cigars?
Yeah, the cigars.
No, so Doc and Shirley were holding hands.
Here's a couple that have been married 48 years at the time, and I saw the way in which they loved each other.
So James Dobson doesn't just fly around in private jets.
Have you ever seen James Dobson heal somebody?
No.
No, he's never done that.
I have seen, I have seen.
Do you know who James Dobson is?
I don't know.
One of Jimmy Swags' books or something, I guess.
Jimmy Swag.
What does he call him?
Jimmy Swag when he hangs out.
All right.
Go to the front for some Jimmy Swag.
Enjoying this hard-hitting interview.
Become a Babylon Bee subscriber to hear the rest of this conversation.
Go to BabylonB.com slash plans for full-length ad-free podcasts.
Kyle and Ethan would like to thank Seth Dylan for paying the bills, Adam Ford for creating their job, the other writers for tirelessly pitching headlines, the subscribers, and you, the listener.