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That doctor is still fat (yeah, I've seen pictures of him) and happy in that corrupt cesspool they call a hospital. I'm not doing so badly considering I was near death when
my family got me out of there. I have a large extended family with plenty of money and they are all good people who take care of their own. I recently finished building a new house
with accomodations for disabled people like me and it just may be that I'll live long enough to see that place shut down and the operators brought to justice. Not because of what they did
to me - that alone is enough to send some people to prison - but I know of one death (someone not even half my age) caused by their incompetence or whatever it is and have good reason to suspect
a few more. That's for a hospital in operation about six years. I certainly intend to do my best to make it happen.
One of the reasons for the brief biography at the beginning is to demostrate that a completely viable and productive human being was removed from the dwindling pool of such people by that irresponsible
and incompetent hospital. Not that
there were ever that many of us as a percentage of the population. I saw it in my former work, as the ones who wrote IBM mainframe assembly code and COBOL line by line (1970s) became, in the latest crop
of developers we got, the first resort in solving any problem was to Google and download some code, plug it in and hope it didn't take too much fiddling to get it working. Not considering the
future problems as the code they never understood or even read completely would have bugs or be compromised by dependency on yet another piece of code they didn't notice until it was modified or
disappeared completely.
In dealing with the news media, lawyers and rebulatory agencies I found the same thing as the next couple of years were spent attempting to:
1) find a lawyer willing to sue the hospital
2) bring the matter to the attention of those responsible for regulating the Medical Industry
3) find someone in the news business to investigate
I definitely wanted to take them to court, who wouldn't? But exposing the problem was most important. I found the usual sources and duly reported the facts. Even supposed
crusaders supposedly seeking to right wrongs gave nothing useful. From the professional litigators - there are a lot of those, including specialists in medical malpractice - I got nothing
more than 'looks like you've got a case all right but we can't help you'. While I was wasting time with lawyers I wasted time with the 'news' media. A couple hundred at least -
newspaper and television - in Arkansas and got a handful of tepid responses from some smaller ones. If I could wrap it up in a nice package and drop it on their desk ready to go it would
be nice otherwise don't bother. I did that for some, but a couple of lawyers let it slip that it was just too complicated.
I suppose those that claim to be 'for the people' are only for the people with a nice quick-and-easy slip-and-fall. Or as a family friend who happens to be a lawyer (yeah, I have one or two) told me:
"If I were one of the lawyers who sue people for a living, like those you've talked to, I wouldn't bother to explain because I wouldn't feel the need. They don't care. They've got their business
model and it works. If they were honest they might tell you, bring me a high-school cheerleader whose car was rearended by a drunk businessman, anyone with money, and left a quadriplegic and her
star quarterback boyfriend dead for extra points, pardon the expression, that's something I can work with. It will require some investment and work on the front end but could pay off big. Other
than something like that, they'll stick with the slip-and-fall stuff. It's easier and the payoffs are usually smaller, but there are a lot of them. That's just the way it is. I defend people, and
they may be guilty, often are. But they have a right to a defense - the law guarantees it. The law should protect the innocent but it doesn't. Innocent people go to prison all the time, and guilty
ones often go free. And those same people, the ones that make it that way, make it hard for truly innocent victims to get justice."
I get it. I didn't set out to write a socio-political commentary but might as well finish with the 'news' media. News for the most part is still television and newspapers even if
most of the consumers get it through the websites of the various outlets. They will still be with us even when newspapers made of paper are no longer distributed and all television-watching is
done on computers and phones. It is unfortunate that the dinosaur media will not go away for quite some time even with continued erosion of its market share.
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