More than $43,000 has been donated in the past three days to help pay for the legal defense of RaDonda Vaught, a former nurse at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who was indicted with reckless homicide after a fatal medication error.

Vaught, 35, of Bethpage, launched a GoFundMe page to crowdfund a lawyer on Friday. As of Monday afternoon, the page had accepted donations from more than 1,200 people, many of whom proclaim to be medical professionals themselves.

The fundraising page also included Vaught's first public comments on the case.

“I want to profess that I am experiencing a world of emotions, beyond words,” Vaught wrote on the fundraising page. “The expressions of peoples' kindness, support, and most significantly, the willingness to forgive are simply unfathomable... I cannot begin to describe it."

Vaught was indicted earlier this month on charges of reckless homicide and impaired adult abuse for a medication error that killed an elderly patient at Vanderbilt in December 2017. The patient, Charlene Murphey, 75, was supposed to be given Versed, a sedative, but Vaught accidentally gave her a lethal dose of vecuronium, a powerful paralyzer, that caused her to suffer cardiac arrest and brain death.

Prosecutors said last week that a central component to the case is the allegation that Vaught made the medication error possible by overriding a safeguard on a medicine dispensing cabinet. However, much of the online reaction to the case has come from medical professionals who say they are shocked that prosecutors would criminalize such an error.

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Mike Cohen, president of the Institute of Safe Medication Practices, said in a statement last week that the organization is strongly opposed to the prosecution. The override feature that appears to be at the core of the case is “available for good reason and used every day,” often in emergencies, he said.

“We do not feel that any practitioner who has not intentionally disregarded what they knew to be a substantial and unjustifiable risk should be disciplined, let alone be charged with criminal homicide,” Cohen wrote in a statement.

Those sentiments are largely echoed in the comments on Vaught’s GoFundMe page, where many donors, often describing themselves as nurses, stress that the medication error was terrible but unintentional.

Vaught appears to admit she made a mistake on the GoFundMe page.

“Many feel very strongly that setting the precedent that nurses should be indicted and incarcerated for inadvertent medical errors is dangerous,” she wrote.

“The many details of this incident deserve to be properly reviewed and addressed so that we all have an opportunity to learn from my mistake and create changes that will ensure the safety of all future patients as well as maintaining the future honesty, integrity & safe practices of all nurses.”

Vaught has declined comment to The Tennessean.

Brett Kelman is the health care reporter for The Tennessean. He can be reached at 615-259-8287 or at brett.kelman@tennessean.com. Follow him on Twitter at @brettkelman.