Last year, 33-year-old Walker Hughes — who has autism and is minimally verbal — was rushed to the hospital after he tried a new medication that made him agitated.
"We're driving at rush hour and my sweet guy is screaming and grabbing me and we're just scared to death," Walker's mom, Ellen Hughes, now 69, said in a StoryCorps interview recorded in February. "This is not the guy I know at all."
Even before they arrived at Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago, Ellen was already anticipating what was going to happen once they got to the emergency room.
"When he was a little boy, an officer got on his back while he was screaming. And he's been handcuffed to gurneys in emergency rooms just for having a seizure and being big," she said. Walker is 6-foot-3.
To make matters worse, on this particular visit, Walker bit Ellen. "I'm sitting there brokenhearted, scared out of my mind, bleeding, and Walker's trying to run away," she said. "And I see, like, five guys on him, and all I think is 'This will not end well. They're gonna kill him.' "
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