Readers of this column may recall that I had a near-death experience fairly recently.
Not the good kind, where you meet all the dear ones who’ve gone before you up the golden stairway. Rather, the kind where you get to be near death because the doctors who’ve treated you in successive institutions failed to coordinate their do’s and their don’ts – their combined parting instructions.
As a result, dangerously incompatible remedies got prescribed simultaneously. Within a few days at home, my vital signs had dropped so steeply that the crew on the ambulance were astonished to find me still conscious and able to talk.
We do know accidents will happen. Should we call this an accident? Let’s ask Aristotle. He writes that one can judge whether an injurious act was accidental or culpable by the way the perpetrator acts afterward. If there is admission of the harm and an effort to repair its effects so as to prevent repetitions, then we can deem it an accident (“involuntary”). If on the contrary, the doer admits no responsibility, then we should call it deliberate (“voluntary”).
In the case I’ve just mentioned, of my near-fatal emergency, no medical professional, in any position of responsibility, whom I dealt with subsequently, wanted to know what happened! A staff person assigned to interview me tried first to tie the emergency to my hip fracture. When I made clear the irrelevancy of that, she went to another hypothesis. I can’t quite recall what she came up with but it was as unconnected to the sudden free fall of my vital signs as her first suggestion had been. I repeated the likeliest explanation: the failure, on the part of each institution, to coordinate its medical prescriptions and prohibitions with those of the successor institution.
“Oh,” finally she wrote down: “mixed medications.”
Nice going, lady. As if the medications – having a mischievous will of their own – just jumped out of their cabinet and mixed each other up!
The practiced evasions of the woman taking my history tell me that I’m unlikely to be the first patient to suffer the consequences of such culpable sloppiness. And it’s more than likely that some have died from the syndrome.
Among the dead is the father of a friend, whose tale of woe came to my attention just the other day. He’d been under treatment for leukemia but his condition looked to be sufficiently controlled to give him, as the doctors treating him told my friend, another two or three good years.
Unfortunately, he suffered a stroke at one point in the treatment. My friend was told by his doctors that this was a side effect sometimes occurring with chemotherapy. In view of his overall condition, his doctors thought he had a good chance to survive the crisis.
However, his survival depended on his continuing to take a particular medication prescribed for his case. While he was in treatment for the stroke, he did not get that medication. The seeming consequence was that he suffered a second stroke from which he died.
My friend was not just grieved. She was outraged! And she consulted a number of lawyers about what looked to be medical irresponsibility. Could she take legal action?
The lawyers advised her that – although her case was actionable – they were not willing to represent her. They described the lawyers for the medical establishment as knowing how to enlarge on the uncertainties and shrink the factor of careless indifference to the point where she’d be unlikely to prevail in court.
What can we conclude? Is it that people specifically and comprehensively trained in the contemporary healing arts can get away with criminal indifference to their patients when they believe that no one is looking?
In Genesis, the first book of the Bible, we are told that
it came to pass, when they were in the field,
that Cain rose up against Abel his brother,
and slew him.
And the Lord said unto Cain,
Where is Abel thy brother?
And he said, I know not:
Am I my brother’s keeper?
Related Content: What I Learned When I Almost Died | Fracture
