In a scorching July 2014 email to the hospital’s lawyers, Wendy R. Armstrong, a lawyer and the wife of Mr. Armstrong’s son Mark, noted that Mark and his brother, Rick, would soon be traveling to Florida to speak at a ceremony marking the 45th anniversary of the first moon landing.
“This event at Kennedy Space Center will receive national news coverage,” Wendy Armstrong wrote. “Rick and Mark have been solicited by several book writers and filmmakers for ‘information about Neil that no one already knows.’” The lawyer suggested that unless the parties reached a quick settlement, the hospital would be publicly criticized for giving lethally flawed care to one of America’s most famous and revered public figures.
The legal settlement adds a grim footnote to the inspiring story of Mr. Armstrong, who avoided the limelight and never cashed in on his fame.
And a different lawyer for the grandchildren?
A lawyer acting as a representative of Mr. Armstrong’s grandchildren in the secret proceedings, Bertha G. Helmick, vividly characterized the stakes for the hospital in a filing in probate court in Hamilton County, Ohio, where Mr. Armstrong lived.
Ms. Helmick noted that the settlement could be undone, and her young clients would lose their share of the money, if the agreement’s terms ever came to light. “If the existence of the wrongful death action and settlement are ever revealed by the parties to the agreement, the entire payment must be repaid in full,” she wrote. (The Times does not have the full settlement agreement.)
His widow, Carol, who was Mr. Armstrong’s second wife, did not participate in the settlement. “I wasn’t part of it,” she said in an interview. “I want that for the record.” When a reporter noted that she had signed off on the settlement in her role as executor of the estate, she replied, “I had no choice — it was either that or lose my job as executor.” Asked if that meant she had not approved of the claim against the hospital, she said, “I don’t think I can answer that,” saying she was subject to a confidentiality agreement.
And, yes, the hospital was negligent
Mr. Armstrong had undergone bypass surgery in early August 2012, and his wife told The Associated Press afterward that he was “amazingly resilient” and was walking in the corridor. But when nurses removed the wires for a temporary pacemaker, he began to bleed into the membrane surrounding the heart, leading to a cascade of problems that resulted in his death on Aug. 25.
But when a nurse removed those wires, Mr. Armstrong began to bleed internally and his blood pressure dropped. Doctors took him to the hospital’s catheterization lab, where an echocardiogram showed, in one expert’s words, “significant and rapid bleeding.” There, doctors drained some blood from his heart, to prevent it from being pressed and hampered by the accumulated fluid.
Mr. Armstrong was then moved from the catheterization lab to an operating room. The records do not make clear what doctors may have done there, but he appears to have lingered for a week or longer before dying on Aug. 25. His family announced at the time that the cause of death was “complications resulting from cardiovascular procedures.”
The expert reviews focus on the hospital’s decision to bring Mr. Armstrong to a catheterization lab rather than directly to an operating room when he began to experience complications. “The decision to go to the cath lab was THE major error,” Dr. Joseph Bavaria, a vice-chair of cardiothoracic surgery at University of Pennsylvania wrote in a review conducted at the request of the Armstrong family.
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