Didier Epopa was set to walk out of Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital after a fifth and final dose of an antiviral drug used to treat COVID. A nurse arrived with an IV bag filled with a clear fluid. The label was the same as earlier doses: Remdesivir.
As the drug flowed into a vein in his right hand, Epopa felt his body seize up. From his eyelids to his toes, all his muscles switched off like a tripped circuit breaker. He couldn’t open his jaw to yell for help or lift his arm to hit the call button.
Epopa began to suffocate, as if buried alive. His heart stopped for eight minutes.
“All was black,” Epopa later recalled, following months of speech therapy to relearn how to talk.
A part-time pharmacy intern had mislabeled the IV bag, records show. Epopa had been given cisatracurium, a muscle-paralyzing agent so potent that at least one state has used it in a lethal injection cocktail for a death penalty execution.