Medical Errors

Standing in line at the library in Gulf Shores, Alabama, a few years ago, I fell into conversation with the man in front of me. He was researching medical facilities in the area—and medical errors in particular—with somewhat alarming findings. “Where would you go if you had a medical emergency around here?” I asked.

“Gulf Breeze, Florida,” he said.

I made a note of this in my journal, though I’d never heard of the place at the time. That was back before I started having trouble with my right knee and left hip. Recently, I’ve made several trips to Gulf Breeze to see specialists in sports medicine.

I think back to my long-ago decision to switch majors from pre-medicine to business. I was convinced I wouldn’t be a good physician, and I didn’t want to be responsible for any failings in that department. Now, having experienced medical errors up close and personal for several family members, I no longer believe I’d have been the worst physician ever. I would have done my best, and perhaps that’s all any of them can do. No one’s perfect, and they are often over-worked. Still…

When my mom became unable to keep any food in her stomach, the doctor performing the colonoscopy said, “I couldn’t get all the way. She’s got a really long colon. But what I saw looked fine.”

When I kept calling his office, I was told, “There’s nothing more we can do for her.”

My mom is as stubborn as they come, and she has long held to a philosophy that doctors are more likely to kill you than help you. Finally, though, she agreed to being taken to the Emergency Room at Vanderbilt. After several hours of waiting and testing, a doctor told us, “We’ve found the problem. There’s a total blockage in her colon where it attaches to the small intestine. We need to operate right away.”

After the surgery, the surgeon told me, “I’ve got good news and bad news.”

I nearly passed out, so fearful was I of the bad news. “The tumor was malignant,” he said, “but I got it all.”

Oh, the relief! It had not spread.

A few years earlier, my dad started having chest pains. The attacks—or spells, as we called them—were so violent he’d turn pale and stagger.  Often, he’d wake up in the night to one of these attacks. We took him to numerous doctors, including cardiologists, all of whom assured us the problem was not his heart. “If it were his heart, he’d be dead by now,” one cardiologist said.

A catheterization was not warranted, they insisted, as the risks were too great. But the spells continued…and worsened. Finally, without an appointment, I took him to the Mayo Clinic to get to the bottom of the problem. We spent over a week seeing various doctors, sitting in waiting room, and listening to medical jargon.

They sent us to the psychiatric department in case he had imagined the problem. In the urology department, a young resident found a cancer cell in his prostate and recommended surgery. “Side effects are extremely rare,” he said.

We left the Mayo with my dad suffering virtually every side effect and the mystery of the spells unresolved. By this time, he’d had several stress tests, all of which he managed to pass… hence, no heart cath.

Eventually, after several years of suffering, he would fail a stress test. The heart cath would reveal that he’d had at least one major heart attack, resulting in damage to about one-third of his heart tissue, and urgently needed a quadruple bypass.

Whereas both of my parents’ misdiagnoses ended happily, my grandfather was less fortunate. The state of medicine at the time—and even now—was such that pancreatic cancer was extremely difficult to diagnose and treat. My grandfather knew something was seriously wrong but kept hoping he was mistaken. When doctor after doctor failed to find any source for his stomach pains, he’d feel blessed relief. For a time. But, of course, the pain persisted, and an exploratory surgery finally revealed the cause…after it had spread throughout his system.

I could go on. I experienced a botched D and C following a miscarriage that I’ll never forget. My grandmother had a rare illness that, treated too long with steroids, led to a hunched back. But that’s enough for now. Of these maladies, I’ve only addressed one thus far in my books in any depth (The Bell City Bottom, Parts I and II, forthcoming).
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We all know life is brief, sorrow is unavoidable, and we count ourselves blessed to partake of the glories of existence on earth as long as we do.