Let Justice Roll Down Like Water

"Everybody Loves To See Justice Done - To Somebody Else" Bruce Cockburn

Oh Sweet, Sweet Justice. It’s music to the ears of any victim of wrong doing. And my bride Emily would be such a person. As per my most recent post, The Unwanted Elephant, my wife trusted an orthopedic surgeon to fix her hip, but he broke her thigh bone in the process. Because of the crack in her femur, she can’t put ANY weight on her right leg for six to eight weeks.

After going home the day after surgery, she had to be re-admitted a few days later, with a post op wound infection. She’s become an invalid and me a full-time caregiver. However, she is on the mend. We have lots of support from our church, our family, and our neighbors. At one point, my largest logistical challenge wasn’t transporting Emily, but was choosing where to store food, since our frig and freezer were both overflowing. Oh, poor me - I jest.

Judge Not, Lest You Be Judged

It’s not surprising that a couple of people have assumed that we would be contacting a “good malpractice lawyer.” It is, after all, hard to drive through any sizable city without seeing the billboards - “Have You Been Injured?” or more locally - “One Call, That’s All.” The latter guy’s got great teeth and a big smile like he’s really happy. I guess we could be that happy too, if money actually did that. But to be perfectly honest, neither my wife nor I had given it a thought. We’ve been very busy accomplishing really basic things. Early on for instance, it took eight minutes for Emily to “walk” the twenty feet from our dining room, where her bed is, to the bathroom - I timed her. Her recent “personal best” is about one minute.

Where’s My Lawyer?

Let’s unpack this attorney thing on a couple of different levels. First, it is so easy to criticize what we know nothing about. Let’s accept the fact that my wife got a suboptimal result. The million dollar question is WHY? Reading “The Unwanted Elephant” and my words above, it’s easy to conclude that the guy goofed up and should pay up for being such a loser. Having first-assisted at several hundred total hip replacements myself, I have a little different perspective than most casual observers. I also snagged a peak at Emily’s post op x-rays. My assessment is that the surgeon knew exactly what he was doing. The stars just didn’t line up perfectly at a key moment in the procedure. He, too, had a bad day.

We talked outside the recovery room about how the size of her femur fell between that of the two broaches available. One was too small, and as he found out, the next, two millimeters larger, was a tiny bit too large. He shared how he was trying to extrapolate her pre-op leg length inequality with a new prosthesis and the available neck length options to make her gait more natural. He described how he ran a cerclage wire through the greater trochanter, with a second loop parallel to the first to reinforce his repair. I wasn’t listening to bragging, it was more like lamenting.

Getting back to my perspective, let’s say I’ve seen 20 patients a day, 225 days per year, for 30 years. That’s roughly 135,000 patient visits. We’ll pretend my decisions and procedures on each of those patients were “spot on” 95% of the time. Just for clarity, they weren’t. But that would mean that I messed up on nearly 7000 patients visits! How’s that for a loser? I’ve never been sued, not because I was flawless but because I grew to know and be known by most of my patients. I was not part of the “Us against Them” paradigm that has consumed much of our society. The same one that frequently sees medical providers and patients as adversaries.

I humbly ask, would any of my readers consider themselves consistently proficient more than 95% of the time? In medicine, potentially life and death decisions are made almost every day - so there’s a little stress thrown into the mix. And that can further magnify imperfections.

One of the doctors making rounds on Emily told her that he was going to start her on a new medicine to protect her stomach due to the large physiological stress of surgery and her infection. He reassured her, “ it’s the same medicine I’ve been taking every day for years to prevent ulcers.” My guess is that most healthcare providers care deeply about their patients. Unfortunately - everybody messes up - that’s a human thing!

What other variables do you think should be on the table when considering the issue of making a law suit?