Horrifying pictures of veterans strewn about the floor of a Veterans Administration hospital in North Carolina have gone viral after a couple posted them to Facebook last week, the Associated Press reported Tuesday. The couple, Hanna and Stephen McMenamin, claimed in the post, complete with the graphic and disturbing pictures below, that they were at the Durham VA Medical Center on Feb. 24 and witnessed an older man in a wheelchair writing in pain and another who eventually had to lay on the waiting room’s floor despite telling a nurse he needed to lay down. The pictures had the faces of each man washed out in blue color.
“The man in the wheelchair on the left, were waiting in that waiting room at least 3 hours,” Hanna McMenamin explained in her post. “The man bent over grabbing the chair, was yelling in pain and was borderline convulsing and almost falling out of his chair he was in so much pain. No one paid him any attention until I approached a nurse to please check on him. This gentleman sat in the waiting room in extreme pain for hours upon hours with very little attention paid to him. ”
As of Wednesday morning, the post had garnered more than 41,000 likes, been shared nearly 134,000 times and almost 17,000 Facebook users had commented, using words like “disgrace” and “disrespectful.”
Vietnam veteran Jesse Lee identified himself as the man in the wheelchair to local NBC affiliate WRAL-TV and said he was at the hospital for treatment of phantom pains from a leg amputation. He claimed he had to wait for hours before he received treatment.
"Somebody in real bad pain should be seen," Lee said. "It felt like a railroad spike was going through my foot. It's like one of the worst pains you've ever felt in your life."
McMenamin updated the post Tuesday and explained the VA had contacted her and asked that the photos be taken down and also expressed its displeasure that the pictures were even posted. The VA also said, according to McMenamin, that one of the men pictured wanted it removed.
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