Malpractice

She came into my office, nodded politely, calmly took a seat, and burst into tears. Edith Padrillo was a twenty-nine year old single mother who had recently come from Pilgrim Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. A surgeon had removed a piece of glass two inches long from her six and a half year old son's hand. The boys name was Peter. The injured hand was his right hand, his primary hand. Another doctor in the emergency room of the local Medford Hospital had a year before sewed the wound up and inadvertently sealed in the piece of glass. Now, a year later, the wound got infected, turned purple and then oozed yellowish pus. Ultimately, the infected wound ruptured, burst open and spewed its poison out in an explosive spray. She rushed him to the Everett Hospital, another local urban hospital, where an x-ray revealed an embedded foreign object. After a careful examination, and gingerly cleaning the infected wound, the general surgeon working in the Emergency Room thought it best to refer the boy to a specialist at a much larger and better equipped, previously mentioned Pilgrim General Hospital in Boston. There, emergency surgery by a hand surgeon finally removed a sharp, "huge," piece of jagged glass. The mother was distraught and crushed with her own feelings of guilt and failure. She cried between gasps: "What kind of a mother am I? How could I have allowed this to happen? Will I go to jail? I don't know why I am here. My friends told me to go see a lawyer." She asked me imploringly: "Who will take care of my kids if I go to jail?" I tried to reassure her that such a happening was extremely unlikely. In the privacy of my mind, I thought of the informal rule of thumb that lawyers used to determine if a possible medical negligence case was worth pursuing: " Oh, my God, how could that have happened?" If this is the the initial reaction, the case might be worth looking into. If it wasn't, then the case was generally not worth investigating further. The reason for this initial reaction test is the cost of pursuing a medical malpractice case, so called, is very heavy in terms of financing, time and effort and length of litigation. It traditionally has had a relatively small trial bar. To me, this shocked reaction seemed like a reasonable one in this case. I also believed that people sitting on a jury would feel the same way. Therefore, I decided to obtain the pertinent documents to enable appropriate experts to render a professional opinion. From what she told me, I thought her guilt feelings were misdirected, though understandable to a fearful mother unschooled in the law. Any criminal responsibility on her part seemed ridiculously remote to me, though I was not a criminal defense attorney. Since the removal surgery, no one had even attempted to bring any charges against her, and it was highly unlikely to happen in the future, in my opinion. But I was thinking of the original doctor who treated the hand or was it mistreated? She sputtered out her story in bursts of words that alternated between wracking sobs and rushes of garbled utterances. It took her a while to calm down. I just nodded sympathetically, trying to understand this tormented mother. Edith was a pale, thin, emaciated woman, with long, scraggly brown hair, who seemed defeated by life and was struggling to keep ahead of her problems. She had a sometime boyfriend named Karl Druzinski, who was erratic in his behavior, presumably because of his drug problems. When off the drugs, and employed as a construction worker, he was helpful, caring and attentive to her needs. However, he had this other side to him. While under the influence of drugs, he was fired because of too many absences from work, and for arguing with his coworkers and bosses. His personality would swing back and forth from a relatively calm demeanor to rage. At times, she had to call the police, when she could no longer handle his violent mood swings. Eventually, she barred him from her apartment. Edith had two other children, each a year apart. John was an older brother and Priscilla was a younger sister, than Peter. All three were fathered by her former husband, Peter, a carpenter. Unfortunately, he was an active alcoholic, whom she married when she was age eighteen. He had abandoned her and their children at her age twenty three, though he would sometimes show up when he had no place else to go. Technically, she was still married, because she couldn't afford a divorce lawyer and didn't want to endure the additional stress. She didn't realize that she might have qualified for legal aid, which might ultimately have lessened her stress. She just didn't want to go there. To my amateur eyes, she seemed to lack sufficient self-esteem, which would have convinced her that she deserved better than what her estranged husband and this sometime boyfriend could offer her. Her parents were divorced and both died prematurely when they were relatively young: he from a stroke and her mother from a heart attack. She remained unchurched because she thought God had also abandoned her and her children.