Right after my 28th birthday I became deathly ill, horrible abdominal pains. No insurance. I stuck out the night and was taken to Emergency the next morning. The pain was so horrible that nothing was helping. I forget if they had put me on morphine. I was out of it. My husband was the one talking to the nurses. A nurse told him she didn't know why they weren't rushing me into surgery as she thought it was appendicitus. He forgot all about this. I was diagnosed with peritonitis. The doctor on call told my husband my white cell count was elevated and fighting off the infection. (Sheesh.) I was put in a room and loaded with antibiotic. The peritonitis got better. After several days they did an upper GI on me. The doctor came back and asked if I'd had my appendix removed, saying they couldn't see it. No, duh, I'd not had it removed. He came back later and said maybe it was a little inflamed and I continued to get better and they released me after several more days saying they didn't want hospital costs totaling up and after the inflammation had gone done they'd consider if my appendix needed to be removed. I had a low grade fever that wasn't going away and every step I took I felt I was dying. After several days I called and said I'm coming back in, something is very wrong. This time for some reason they rushed me into surgery. I woke up to an intern or resident standing over me going on about how it was amazing, my ruptured appendix, he'd never seen anything like it, he went on about it like it was an incredible baseball game. Turned out my appendix had been ruptured for a full ten days but that the surrounding organs had closed around the infection and done a pretty effective job of quarentening it and keeping me from dying. I was very weak and just glad to be alive. I was so glad to be alive it didn't even occur to me to sue. I had no idea it would effect my health to the degree that it did for I was sick a long time afterwards. By the time it occurred to me I should have sued we were going through my husband having had a car jack break in half while he was changing a tire and his wrist just escaped being severed, its bones crushed to mush. So we were just dealing with that, difficult for a keyboard player. There were three times in our lives where we should have sued but didn't. This was one of them.
I want to clarify. I must sound uneducated not thinking about suing. It's not like I didn't have an inside view on the medical world. My father was a research scientist in bio/radiation field and I grew up in that environment and then in the environment of his teaching at a med school and then he returned to med school and became himself a psychiatrist. So it's not like I hadn't a bird's eye view on the med world. Plus I worked for several years as office manager, handling insurance and everything else. I'd watched as non-profit hospitals went to profit. I was always insulted by doctors who didn't know I'd grown up in a medical family treating me like some idiot.
When something like this happens it seems the first response would be to think about suing. First off, I was just surviving afterwards. Secondly, human nature in my case said "I'm so terrified, try to erase it from memeory". It scared me to death I'd lived for ten days with a ruptured appendix. I just wanted to forget about it. And third, no one ever advised us to sue. I guess that's one reason it's not bad to have lawyers chasing after accident victims etc. saying sue, sue. Because when you're in the trenches your mental cylinders are occupied.
But then, who knows, I may have lost the suit.
Frankly, this story left me more worried about Liz than it did about medical malpractice. That does NOT sound like a fun way to grow up.
I was kind of slow on the uptake and watched two separate comedies of errors unfold, except that neither was exactly comic, one medical and one legal, without realizing what was going on until it was too late to do anything about either, assuming anything could have been done. I can in a way understand doctors being outraged about being sued when they do their best and still fuck up, just as I suppose I would have been outraged if I had been sued for being an inadequate neighbor or courtroom witness, as, in retrospect, I think I was.
One problem is a payment system that depends on finding someone in particular to blame when there is plenty of blame to go around, and really it seems unreasonable as well as uncharitable to try to pin it on one of the many fallible parties to this or any misfortune.
On the other hand if the judge had let me tell the full story, I think he might have awarded at least a little money to the plaintiff.
Liz and her mother had a conflictful relationship, but I think I have made Barbara sound a little more difficult than she usually was. Liz is now grown and the last I heard is doing OK. Barbara has recently been channeling her sense of injustice into pleading community causes (usually, but not always, lost causes) before the City Council, and has learned to focus and make sense when presenting a case to an audience.
Thanks, Huitzil. It makes me feel better to know that. (And, yes, I am the sort of person who worries about the subjects of blog stories in the middle of the night.)
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