news story / By Heidi Walters

Fran Day Returns

In town for court, the former Eureka doc encounters her past

(July 22, 2010)  Just moments after Dr. Fran Day left the Eureka library last Wednesday afternoon and began walking across the parking lot to her car, they saw her. First it was a fortyish man, with medium-length dark brown hair, glasses, and silver rings on his fingers. “Dr. Day!” he cried out from across the lot. He hurried up to her. “Oh my God, I’m so glad to see you! Are you all right?”

“Well,” Dr. Day said, “I just got charged with some felonies, so not too well. How are you?”

Dr. Fran Day and former patient Larry Seminoft. PHOTO BY HEIDI WALTERS

GALLERY >

“Not well,” said the man, who reminded her his name was Larry Seminoff. “The doctors won’t take me. They said, ‘You’re Dr. Day’s patient, we can’t take you.’”

He said he hadn’t been able to get other doctors to prescribe the methadone he used to get through Dr. Day, 120 mg a day for anxiety and chronic pain, since Day left town in March — precipitously, without notifying her patients ahead of time or leaving them their patient files. (See “Where is Dr. Fran Day,” March 18).

Seminoff recounted how he’d gone up to her little house/office, near here on Fourth Street, and seen the note on the door saying she’d gone away on a family emergency. And how, when he came back a few days later, a new note said she’d gone for good. “I panicked,” Seminoff told her. “I tried getting meds everywhere. But Medi-Cal Mobile won’t take me. Open Door won’t take me. I kept trying to get a doctor, but they told me to go to Urgent Care [at the hospital]. So that’s why I’m on the street now, trying to get methadone. Anything it takes.”

Methadone was going for $5 a pill on the street, he said. With a prescription from Day, under Medical, he’d been able to get them from the pharmacy for 25 cents a pill. He couldn’t afford the street meds anymore. And he was all out. Could she help him? Would she prescribe him some methadone? A doctor at Urgent Care had given him some Ibuprofen — he rattled the big, full bottle of it he still carried in his pocket — but it did nothing for the pain. He lifted his pant leg to show his left foot, permanently bent from an accident. “If I don’t have pain medication I can’t walk,” he said.

And, oh, Seminoff said, he was dreading the looming withdrawal. “You feel like you want to die,” he said. “Throwing up, diarrhea, you can’t move for three, four, five days. And then you go through sleep deprivation.”

“I think it’s illegal to refuse care,” Day said, looking nearly as distressed as Seminoff. But no, she said, she could not prescribe him anything. She was under investigation by the Humboldt County District Attorney’s office, which filed a misdemeanor complaint against her last December charging her with two counts of resisting, obstructing and delaying three emergency medical technicians while they were attempting to bring one of her patients to the hospital. When she’d returned to Humboldt for court hearings this particular week — she’s living in Eugene, Ore., now — she’d learned that the DA’s office had charged her with six more counts: five felony counts of prescribing controlled substances to addicts, and one potentially lesser count of prescribing to herself. And now, she said, the DA’s office was filing a motion to force her to forfeit her prescription pads and abstain from prescribing, per a rule that allows such action when a doctor is charged with a felony.

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