“I reacted instantly,” said Ioanna Gaka, the doctor currently in pretrial detention, in her statement to the investigating judge, maintaining that she and her husband, Ilias Theodoropoulos, did everything required during those critical momentswhen Giorgos Mazonakis was fighting for his life inside their clinic on Karneadou Street. “I started CPR immediately,” the accused doctor claimed.
Among other things, the accused doctor told the investigating judge: “I immediately put an oxygen mask on him and started calling for Ilias. I don’t know if the monitor had an alarm function. I called out to the nurse to prepare the epinephrine for me and asked them to call for Ilias immediately. I didn’t see which nurse came. I started performing CPR; I had surgical training, so I knew how to respond to an emergency. I reacted instantly. It wouldn’t have made any difference if I’d been at the hospital. CPR can be performed on the street as well. We have adrenaline available at the clinic. (…) My husband arrived immediately and got started. CPR. It all happened within a minute. We followed the necessary steps. And even if we’d been inside the hospital, we would have done exactly the same thing in the same amount of time. As soon as we saw that he wasn’t responding, we immediately called the ambulance service. In the panic, it took us about five minutes to call the ambulance. I administered the adrenaline, and Theodoropoulos performed CPR. When the ambulance arrived, they took him out on a chair instead of a stretcher, as they should have done so as not to interrupt the CPR.”
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Mazonakis Case: Rapid Developments – The Doctors’ Daughter Testifies
Question: How do you think Mazonakis went into cardiac arrest?
Answer: I cannot answer that with certainty. Besides, the medical examiner’s report has not provided any answers on this point either.
Question: Why wasn’t the defibrillator working?
Answer: I activated the defibrillator, and it indicated asystole. The defibrillators from both the National Ambulance Service (EKAV) and “Elpis” showed the same result. A person’s heart can go straight into asystole. That is exactly what cardiac arrest is.
Question: Why didn’t someone go along with the ambulance?
Answer: What the paramedic said isn’t true. I was the first to get into the ambulance, and they told me to get out because apparently there wasn’t enough room.
Question: Why were the appointments deleted from iCloud?
Answer: I don’t deal with administrative matters at all.
Theodoropoulos’s
Statement
Giving his own account of what happened at the clinic after Giorgos Mazonakis’s condition rapidly deteriorated, Ilias Theodoropoulos told the investigator that he immediately initiated CPRCPR as soon as he was informed of the situation at 4:15 p.m.
For example, in his defense, the defendant stated: “I checked his pulse and immediately began CPR, chest compressions, and rescue breathing, at a ratio of three to one, as required by protocol. Ms. Gaka administered 1 ml of epinephrine in my presence. When I entered the room, Ms. Gaka was not performing CPR on him; she was standing near the machine, close to the patient’s right arm. I told them to call the ambulance service. It must have taken about four to five minutes from the time I entered the room until the call was made. I reported a cardiac emergency and requested a cardiac unit. Ms. Gaka’s clinic had a defibrillator, as part of the INUS machine’s operation. We both know how to use a defibrillator, but since there was asystole, we did not use it.”
Elsewhere in his testimony, the doctor, who is currently in pretrial detention, stated: “I was not asked to accompany the ambulance. I believe Ms. Gaka’s defibrillator was working, but we didn’t use it because of the asystole. I have never tested it. I do not know if Ms. Gaka had checked it either. The paramedics left at 4:40 p.m.”
As expected, the investigator asked Ilias Theodoropoulos why he did not accompany the patient to the hospital, and he replied as follows: “I was not the patient’s attending physician, so I did not go to the hospital. I had nothing further to offer. Nor did Ms. Gaka have anything further to offer the staff at ‘Elpis.’ She had already provided all necessary information to the paramedics, as the patient’s doctor. The paramedics had our phone numbers, so they—as well as the hospital staff—could contact us at any time for any information.”
During his testimony, however, Ilias Theodoropoulos was also asked about the equipment at the Karneadou clinic, to which he replied that his wife uses the equipment strictly for its intended purposes. “Ms. Gaka’s machine belongs to a borderline category that falls under the general term ‘plasma exchange,’ because the nature of the machine has not been legally defined, and because it is not classified by the National Organization for Medicines (EOF). There is no representative in Greece to submit a relevant application to the EOF,” said the defendant, continuing: “If the buyer is located in a country that does not permit the operation of such a machine, the manufacturer is obligated to state that it cannot be sold in that country. Ms. Gaka purchased it because she believed that the machine’s value, within the context of a regenerative, holistic approach—backed by the controls and regulatory bodies in countries such as Germany, Austria, and notification to the Hellenic Medical Association, is fully covered for its use.”
Source: Proto Thema
