Diane McCloud ordered out of hospice

A Hempstead woman released from jail two weeks ago to a hospice to live her final days must move out, a judge ruled Tuesday, after a nurse there testified she was too lively for the facility.

Earlier this month, a doctor testified that Diane McCloud, 48, who suffers from end-stage heart failure, was sleeping nearly all the time, breathing shallowly and unable to walk to the bathroom. A hospice nurse testified Tuesday that she is talking on the phone for long periods, getting dressed and showering without help, and leaving her ward to explore without permission.

"It's not normal for a hospice patient to be this ambulatory," said Barbara Walsh, a nurse who has been assigned to McCloud at Franklin Hospital's hospice in Valley Stream.

Judge Francis Ricigliano ordered that McCloud be transferred back to the Nassau County Correctional Facility Wednesday. She will be evaluated first at the Nassau University Medical Center, and if doctors there find that she is too ill to be locked up, she will be treated in the hospital under police custody, Ricigliano said. If she's not too ill, she will go back to jail on shoplifting charges, the judge ruled.

When McCloud, who has not attended her recent court appearances, was transferred to hospice care earlier this month, several members of her family sobbed and clung to each other upon hearing the testimony about her grim condition. None of them attended Tuesday's hearing in Mineola.

Ricigliano said McCloud's attorney, Leonard Isaacs of Valley Stream, called him Thursday to say that the hospice had notified him his client was too healthy to stay. After hearing from McCloud's nurse, Ricigliano said testimony earlier this month by Dr. Sanjay Doddamani, chairman of the cardiology department at NUMC, turned out to be "faulty," though he said he did not doubt the doctor believed what he was saying at the time.

"He said she was immobile, in a very, very terminable state and getting worse," Ricigliano said. "In fact this is not the case."

Ricigliano said McCloud's doctor had told him that, while she was in jail, she had more than once removed an intravenous tube. Each time she removed the tube, her condition worsened, the doctor told Ricigliano.

Walsh said McCloud's tube had come out again recently, but she believes it happened accidentally when McCloud had dressed herself in her regular clothes, something she is not supposed to do.

Doddamani attended Tuesday's hearing and declined to address the court. Ricigliano excused McCloud from serving the remainder of a 21/4- year jail sentence Jan. 10, after Doddamani said she had "days or weeks" to live.

At the time, that appeared to be the final chapter of a long saga for McCloud, who Ricigliano first released from jail in January 2011 so she would be eligible for a heart transplant. She had been convicted of stealing $3,800 worth of items from a Target store in Westbury.