Chapter 3

Presumably the reader will understand my anger once I realized what had been done to me. These days my anger at the subhuman cretin responsible (cretins actually, but that is for another time) is rather casual. That doctor is a young man, and will likely harm many more patients. I know of at least one who as died as a result of his malpractice, a young man, much younger than me. Perhaps he and this corrupt hospital will one day be exposed but how many will die before then?

To briefly review the case, consider this: a doctor, entrusted with the care of a patient with a relatively routine injury behaved in such a reckless and incompetent manner as to cause my death or at best my being left in a vegetative condition, to feed the beast for months or years until the machines were at last turned off. Perhaps at that time any salvageable organs would be sold off. One last bite.

I should probably take the occasion to suggest that being identified as an organ donor is a very bad idea. The time will come when, if you are injured in some mishap or become ill, those who have custody of you will see to it that you do not survive.

In any case, while Hospital A and Hospital B certainly committed egregious malpractice, the doctor at Hospital C had the opportunity had he been so inclined to quickly heal me and send me back to a normal life. I quickly recovered from the kidney injury, as is usually the case. All that was needed was a reasonable quality of care. Whether incompetence or avarice - from what I know about the hospital I suspect both - he nearly destroyed a perfectly viable human being.

To be sure the actions of Hospital B were irresponsible, but in failing to make any attempt to ascertain my condition or request assistance from more experienced doctors he failed more miserably than they.

But enough of that. What do you do when you have been treated thus? Sue the hospital and the doctor? That is much more easily said than done, as I would learn.

They're all around. Television, radio, billboards, Internet. If you've been injured.... The self-righteous pontifications. For the people. Boasts of success. Hundreds of millions recovered for victims...

Ironically, like most I always regarded lawyers as unfortunately necessary and hoped I would never need one. Obviously some lawyers perform a useful service, even when defending a criminal they are upholding our principles of justice - that everyone is entitled to a defense. And business law is a mixed bag. I've met quite a few lawyers, and some are relatives or friends of the family, and then seem nice enough but I've not seen them in court. One did offer some insight, which I'll relate shortly.

Professional litigators I have no use for. With a few exceptions the rare 'crusaders' are mostly tools of crackpots and chronic malcontents dedicated to the destruction of what is left of society. The exceptions are those with an actual conscience who defend the decent people under attack by the aforementioned.

Once mostly referred to as 'ambulance chasers' the term 'slip and fall' lawyers now seems be preferred. The business model works well, because there are a lot more people falling in convenient (depending on perspective) places and the statistics favor more successful lawsuits, even if each case delivers a smaller award.

A person falling in a grocery store or bank lobby is much easier to process. A victim of an automobile accident requires much more work. And most businesses will quickly settle a small claim - a few hundred thousand compared to millions and eventually reduced in settlement - but will fight a million-dollar case and the expenditure in collecting evidence and witnesses is much more, and there is always the possibility of failure even in an apparently airtight case.

You don't pay unless we win is a common tagline. Because they won't take the case unless winning is a near certainty. The few who refuse to settle and successfully defend themselves are acceptable losses.

I tried the big ones first. Made copies of about ten pounds of hospital records and sent it with the foregoing narrative. They 'regretfully' informed me that they would not be able to help.

"Not that you don't have a good case, but it isn't something we are able to do. "

Despite their very nice website with details of cases of medical malpractice and the millions of dollars in awards.

I tried another one, the one that professes to be 'for the people'. After contacting them in the usual manner through their website, this one replete with accounts of their record of delivering justice for the 'little people' I got hourly phone calls until I returned one and described the situation. That was the end of that. Maybe being one of the little people isn't enough.

There is some lawyer with a radio talk show, his website has a list of lawyers who specialize in personal injury. A handful of them had a contact form that actually worked - I was able to leave my contact information and a description of the case - but never received a reply. On most of them everything I entered was rejected as 'possible spam' and that was that.

An acquaintance who is a lawyer (he does defense work so is at least nominally one of the good guys) explained it thus:

Your situation would require actual work and some financial investment if only in paying their staff. It would pay off big but it's easier to take the nearly guaranteed payoffs for may be a couple hundred thousand, enough of those add up to millions, billions even for the big guys.

You give them a case where a high school cheerleader is in a car that gets rear-ended by a drunk - a rich or well-insured one obviously - leaving her a paraplegic and the star quarterback dead for extra points, pardon the expression, that may require some investment but will very likely pay off big.

And with cases like that they're all over it immediately, vultures sitting around the hospital, waiting to offer the services. But you're Joe Sixpack, not a pretty cheerleader, the hospital has high-dollar lawyers and they'll have to work for it and it's not so cut-and-dried.

A word about lawyers and their websites. Most are poorly constructed using templates and provided little information beyond the type of litigation available, sometimes a few successful suits (most of them years old) and a contact page.

I mention this because the Medical Industry is similar in this respect. Very large hospitals have relatively well-done sites but even those are not well maintained and of not much use beyond stating where the hospital is located and (mostly useless) contact information. They do sometimes have a page showing their doctors, and sometimes the board of directors. These are the high dollar professional shoots, I've been featured in a few. They bring in a portable studio complete with makeup people, everything picture perfect.

Lower in the food chain it's worse. Many local clinics do not even have a website, and there only web presence is a link to another site - sometimes an association of some sort or a hospital with which they are affiliated - and those are often not functional. My personal physician - yes, I still have one - is part of a small clinic used by my family for generations. It has no website, only a link to the hospital of which it is effectively a part.

But like lawyers they have no reason to care. The customers require their services, such as they are, and will find them. And while there are many lawyers, there are fewer doctors and outside large cities few hospitals. And customer satisfaction is nothing to be concerned about as there is no accountability.

Hospital C, by the way, has a website rather amateurishly executed using one of the less capable website builder sites. Like most it provides little information but does have a page with the high quality photographs of their staff. Including the doctor who nearly killed me. Since I have never actually seen him, that was nice of them.

But back to lawyers. I would spend the next year contacting perhaps two hundred lawyers. From most I got no response at all (who knows if they ever received my message) and the few who asked for more details were 'regrettably' unable to help. Several law firms located in the same city as Hospital C did have the honesty to simply reply that they would not sue a local hospital.

I find it regrettable as well, but these days there is little about most people I don't find regrettable.

There are a number of websites that allow reporting of Medical Industry malfeasance, some are advertised as being for 'whistleblowers' (usually with promises of monetary reward if you blow the whistle on the right entity) which would put them in a class with lawyers. Two or three actually advertised specifically for reports of LTCH fraud, again no response.

Near the end the second year, when the statute of limitations would expire, I did get a lawyer some distance away to look at the case, but he said that there would not be time to prepare and declined. At least he had something resembling an excuse.

I suppose Hospital C will continue to feast on the helpless prey delivered by the at least nominally legitimate facilities in the area. It's a large area - I have identified through death records residents of four states. Most are from the state were it is located and a neighboring one, but some were sent from further away. The local hospitals have no excuse for not knowing - I sent them a lengthy message describing my ordeal. I received no replies. As for the ones farther away, I see no reason they would have cared any more than the local ones.