Christine Nolte sat in a Kansas City, Kansas, courtroom on Thursday, telling jurors how she and her husband met decades ago and describing the dedicated father he later became and the joyful way he lived his life.
Then she tearfully recounted the agonizing way Stephen Nolte died — after contracting a fatal infection following open-heart surgery in 2019 at The University of Kansas Hospital.
She lost track of all the doctors he saw in those final months, how many medical appointments he had and the number of trips they made to the ER. And when he was eventually placed in hospice care and a blood test finally confirmed that he had Mycobacterium chimaera infection, or M. chimaera, Christine Nolte said, he was sent back KU Med “to see if they could save him.”…