Colchester – A 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 suicide.
In August 2019, Richard Pawulski was a healthy 42-year-old man and a successful physiotherapist who had just moved into his dream home in Colchester with his wife, Malgorzata, and his teenage daughter, Amellia. He was working in the yard on a summer day when he was accidentally bitten by a mosquito that carried the deadly Eastern Equine Encephalitis virus, commonly known as EEE.
Pawulski started experiencing flu-like symptoms on August 22 and was soon taken to a hospital, where he fell into a two-month coma.
On October 1, the mystery of what made Pawulski sick was solved, but the prognosis was bleak. Pawulski contracted the EEE virus, which infected his brain. The 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 started to walk and speak again. But he demanded months of constant care. He was bedridden in hospitals and rehabilitation facilities for 16 months. When he finally managed to speak, he said he felt as if he had “been through hell” and “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”
Pawulski was one of four people to contract the EEE virus in 2019 – and he was the only one who survived.
Just before Christmas 2020, Pawulski finally returned home to Colchester and reunited with his wife and daughter.
Although his family was very happy to finally have him home, his return home was not the happy occasion they had hoped for.
Pawulski was due to be released from the Riverside Health and Rehabilitation Center in East Hartford in November, just in time for Thanksgiving, but the process was cut short by bureaucracy with insurance approvals for home health care. His release was delayed and Richard was devastated. He had already spent a whole year away from his family, isolated for months due to the COVID-19 pandemic – also fighting and beating the coronavirus last spring – and was ready to go home.
He wanted his life back.
While Pawulski waited for insurance to be approved in mid-November and early December, the chances of him returning home before Christmas diminished, stealing Pawulski’s ray of hope.
Then, one night, Pawulski said he was denied the most basic human decency – the team in charge of caring for him at Riverside reportedly refused to change his diaper. He asked several times to be changed, so as not to have to sit uncomfortably with a dirty diaper in order to sleep. The team, he said, scoffed at him for his weight and then ignored his calls for help. They had removed his call button, so he couldn’t ask for help, and they sent him back to his room when he headed out into the hall for help. From his room, he could hear them laughing.
And at that moment, Pawulski lost all hope. He said he reached into the closet and took 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 saved by a team member who finally acknowledged his earlier cries for help and was then transferred to Hartford Hospital. Malgorzata received a phone call that almost broke her heart – she was told that her husband, so close to returning home, had attempted suicide.
Sitting at her home in December, holding her husband’s hand, her eyes filled with tears as the husband remembered the moment when he hooked the hanger around his neck.
“He just lost all hope,” she said.
When Malgorzata arrived at Hartford Hospital, she decided that she would take him home. He would not go back to Riverside.
“Why would we send you back to a place that made you want to die?” she said.
Pawulski was in Riverside from May to December 2020. During that time, he said he was repeatedly neglected, left sitting in dirty diapers for hours and hours, without access to phones to talk to his family – even during the peak of COVID- Pandemic from 19, when visitors were not allowed. He said he was ridiculed by team members who made fun of him because of his weight and said his wife would leave him because of his appearance.
Pawulski said his call button, his only way of signaling that he needed help while he was confined to a wheelchair he can barely get into on his own, was taken from him. His family complained that he needed to find a way to ask for help, but it was never returned, they said.
At the end of his stay, Pawulski said that an employee who worked the night shift started hitting him, hitting his arms and body. His family still has pictures on his phone of big yellow bruises on his body.
The Riverside administrator did not respond to The Day’s repeated requests about Pawulski’s allegations of abuse and neglect.
The Connecticut Department of Public Health is still processing a request for public records submitted by The Day requesting information on any reported cases of neglect abuse at Riverside, or at the Salmon Brook Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Glastonbury, where Pawulski was before moving to Riverside.
At Salmon Brook, Pawulski said he was never physically abused, but he was just as neglected. Salmon Brook’s operator said it had no comment on its allegations of negligence or abuse.
Throughout 2020, Pawulski’s wife and daughter said they were so desperate that they called the police several times to ask for help and complain of negligence at both centers. Richard also called the police at rehab centers, they said.
Lt. Joshua Litwin of the East Hartford Police Department said the department had a record of a phone call made about Pawulski’s care in Riverside. Litwin said Pawulski’s daughter called East Hartford police in the fall of 2020 complaining that she was unable to speak to her father. The dispatcher told her that, unfortunately, it was not a police problem because there was no criminal complaint and suggested that she contact the facility’s administration.
Litwin said that in his 20 years in the police department, he never heard of any criminal complaints involving Riverside.
Glastonbury Police Department chief Marshall Porter said his department had no records of phone calls alleging abuse or neglect at Salmon Brook.
Now that Richard is home, his wife and daughter say they are facing an entirely new nightmare.
The family has been trying desperately for state approval to receive home care for Richard for more than a month, which requires 24-hour care to move, eat and use the bathroom. His wife said she was told that approvals are delayed because he left the rehab program ahead of time. He was brought home earlier, she said, because he was so mistreated that he wanted to die.
His wife is away from her job at Middlesex Hospital in Middletown. Her co-workers generously donated her paid free time so that she could look after her husband.
But they are running out of time and are frustrated. They said it is almost a full-time job for them to try to work with social workers and state officials to get approved for home care and SNAP benefits to help with their expenses, now that they have only one income. Amellia, a 10th grader at the Bacon Academy School, often has to leave her virtual classes early, or skip them altogether, to take calls and help her dad when he needs something.
They call social workers day after day, but have received no response, no relief.
“My family never asked for help for anything,” said Malgorzata through tears in December. “We always work hard and take care of ourselves and now, when we need help, no one is on our side.”