Toy designer Mark Boudreaux has died after being left on a ventilator by a Cincinnati hospital for more than a year following his diagnosis with COVID-19.
“We lost Mark this morning,” his wife, Judy Boudreaux, said in a text sent to The Epoch Times on May 14.
Mark Boudreaux designed some of America’s most iconic toys—including the beloved Millenium Falcon spaceship from “Star Wars” and the sail barge known well among fans as the Khettana.
For fun, he gave characters from the iconic movie franchise, such as Stormtroopers, Endor Rebels, and an AT-ST driver, his own face.
The Cincinnati native also designed action figures, including a Batman figure, and playsets based on the movies “Transformers,” “Ghostbusters,” and “Jurassic Park.”
Judy Boudreaux went from trying to get him weaned from the mechanical ventilator to fighting to keep him on it after he suffered so much ventilator damage to his lungs that he couldn’t breathe without it.
When doctors declared that the only way Mark Boudreaux would breathe on his own again was with a lung transplant, she called dozens of transplant centers around the United States, but none of them would even consider his case.
“No one would help us,” Judy Boudreaux told The Epoch Times.
Breach of Hippocratic Oath
Following news of Mark Boudreaux’s death, nationally recognized physician Dr. Pierre Kory, who got involved in Boudreaux’s case after The Epoch Times stories ran, said he has never seen a hospital so unwilling to help a patient.According to Kory, when he lined up a Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved treatment that has shown promising results for patients such as Mark Boudreaux, the hospital refused to sign the forms to authorize it.
“No one there was willing to help him, to do anything for him,” Kory said. “It was basically a complete failure of the Hippocratic Oath.”
The hospital also sought a court order to take Boudreaux off a dialysis machine he was on after his kidneys were damaged from prolonged ventilation use.
Court records show that the hospital argued that Mark Boudreaux’s living will indicated that he didn’t want his life artificially prolonged.
His living will does say that, but it specifies that he didn’t want his life sustained through an artificial feeding tube—which is what he was on during his entire hospitalization.
But as Judy Boudreaux pointed out to The Epoch Times, Mark’s living will stated that he only wanted an attending physician to have the power to withhold life-saving treatment if he was unable to make decisions regarding his medical treatment.
Although bedridden and no longer able to talk, Mark Boudreaux wrote several times on a piece of paper “I want to live.”
His living will also stated that he wanted his life ended only if he had an “incurable or irreversible condition.”
The treatment Kory had lined up for Boudreaux is a type of therapy containing stem cells and exosomes—a fatty sac found inside a cell that has properties that can locate and reduce inflammation and promote healing.
The exosome and stem cell therapy has performed well enough to win approval from the FDA as an investigational new drug (IND).
Kory said he and other medical practitioners have used it successfully to treat COVID-19 patients and others suffering from substantial pulmonary distress.
“We started treating a few patients, and our first patient within two days already showed significant benefits,” he said.
Bethesda North Refused Release
It’s only drawback is that the therapy is expensive and not covered by insurance, Kory said. But that wasn’t an issue for Mark Boudreaux.The problem, according to Kory, was that Mark Boudreaux’s treating physicians refused to sign off on a “compassion use” form, which is required to administer an IND treatment.
Dr. Charles Thurston, a retired doctor and now a patient advocate, who also got involved in Mark Boudreaux’s case, told The Epoch Times that when he found a long-term acute care facility in Missouri willing to take him, Bethesda North wouldn’t sign the release unless Judy Boudreaux, Mark Bourdeaux’s legal guardian, agreed to a variety of conditions.
They included inoculating Mark with the COVID-19 vaccine, something Judy Bourdeaux previously told The Epoch Times that both she and Mark Bourdeaux were opposed to and that she constantly fought with the hospital over.
“I feel like they just really wanted him to die,” Thurston said.
Fans Bid Farewell to an Icon
“Had he had a real doctor—and when I use the saying ’real doctor,' I mean someone who puts the patient as the primary consideration, not the rules, not the protocols—and decides what’s the best thing that you can do for them on a risk-benefit basis and follow that and do everything you can for the patient,” Kory said.However, Mark Bourdeaux did have his cheerleaders.
After learning of his situation, complete strangers started online petitions asking Bethesda North to “seek every avenue possible” to save Mark Bourdeaux.
A group of colleagues from Hasbro, where Mark Bourdeaux worked for more than four decades, was working on a fundraiser for him.
Star Wars fans also paid homage to him on social media and on a variety of fan outlets, including Jedi Temple Archives, which headlined the sad news: “The Passing of an Icon: Star Wars Designer Mark Boudreaux Is One With the Force.”
