LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Kentucky Judge Eddie Lovelace is one of seven people suspected of dying from a fungal meningitis outbreak that's swept several states.
His widow, Joyce, says her husband received three steroid injections for back pain this summer at the St. Thomas Outpatient Neurosurgerical Center in Nashville.
Days after the last of his three injections, he started experiencing headaches and complained of tingling in his hands while at their home in Albany, Ky.
"He said there's something wrong with his legs," Lovelace recalled. "He said, 'I went to get the paper and I fell twice.'"
Judge Lovelace was hospitalized in Nashville but died September 17th.
Days later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a recall of the drugs suspected to be involved in the outbreak.
It was around that time that Lovelace says she received two phone calls from St. Thomas representatives asking about the judge's symptoms and if an autopsy had been performed.
"We didn't know anything about the contamination," Lovelace said during a phone interview with WDRB News. "I didn't hear anything about that. they didn't mention it."
She was told her husband died of a stroke. Now she has doubts.
"I've had many emotions," Lovelace said. "I couldn't begin to describe what we've been through. It was hard enough losing him, and now to think that someone dropped the ball. And now we've lost him."
Those who knew of Judge Lovelace say he planned to enter private practice after finishing his term on the bench.
"You talk about the passion he had, the passion for the law, and was an excellent judge," said David Nicholson, Jefferson County Circuit Clerk.
The Lovelace family is now working with an attorney to determine his cause of death.
"Just a waste of a valuable human's life," said Lovelace.
Our calls to the St. Thomas center were not returned.
The New England Compounding Center that makes the recalled steroid is cooperating with health investigators to find the source of the infections. It has also issued a voluntary recall of all its products.
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Judge Eddie Lovelace
