The Hosptial Experience (Final Draft)
Dylan Shackelford
I thought I was dying. Tears streamed down my face as I looked out of the window while my mom sped to the hospital. I had some blood on my shirt that I coughed up earlier. The hospital, however, sent me home after two hours there saying they couldn’t find anything wrong with me. I would find out the next day, after the worst night of my life, that I had an extreme case of Clostridium Difficile (I wouldn’t look it up if you don’t like gross things). It is basically an inflammation of the colon caused by bacteria. It causes blood to come out of everywhere. It was the worst experience of my life. The hospital sent me away because they didn’t know how to treat it.
Bad hospital experiences are a common trend not only in America but around the world. According to CNBC, preventable medical errors are the number three cause of death in the United States behind heart disease and cancer. If my mother had not taken me back to the hospital the next morning after they sent me home and demanded they do something, I could have been one of the 250,000 people a year who lost their lives due to medical error. These preventable deaths are not always accidents either. Just last year in my hometown of Tyler, Texas, a nurse who worked for the hospital I was born in was arrested for intentionally killing patients. William Davis was a nurse at Mother Francis and was a friend of my stepmother. He seemed like a normal guy, as they always do, but he killed 3 patients according to KLTV and his indictment. Knowing stuff like this is happening in a place so close to me is chilling and makes me and many other people I know scared of having to go to the hospital.
In my case, the hospital admitted they found something in the tests they ran, but they didn’t have anyone who could treat it. They eventually had an ambulance take me on the worst two-hour ride of my life to the Children’s Medical Center in Dallas. Thankfully, these guys knew how to treat me and I survived. I had to miss two weeks of school, but at least I was able to go to school again. Other people are not so lucky and lose their lives if hospitals make such mistakes. According to the Civil Justice Resource Group, 25,000-120,000 of accidental hospital deaths per year are due to negligence. Considering everything individuals have to go through to become medical professionals and considering the amount they get paid, numbers like that should be nowhere near that high. We trust these medical experts with our lives and between 25,000-120,000 people die a year because the professionals didn’t care enough.
Around one percent of every hospital, the patient is a victim of malpractice in one way or another according to the Civil Justice Resource Group, so the chances are somebody you know has been a victim. According to an article in The Advocate, a newsletter of the Trial Lawyers Section of the Florida Bar, medical malpractice plaintiffs win only 27% of trial cases. Not only is it wrong that this happens so often in the first place, but the fact that they get away with it most of the time is even more concerning. I know most doctors are good and a lot of the time medical errors are unintentional, but if you unintentionally run a red light and kill someone, you still killed someone and will have to live with that for the rest of your life. I also know it is a really tough line of work and it is easy to make mistakes, but it is what these medical professionals chose to do, so they should do their best to keep everyone safe.
Jason Konvicka, one of Virginia’s “super lawyers,” defined medical malpractice in an article by Forbes. He states, “medical malpractice occurs when a health-care provider deviates from the recognized ‘standard of care’ in the treatment of a patient.” He goes on to explain that the “standard of care” is what a “prudent” health professional would have done in the exact same situation and can determine whether the medical professional was negligent in the way he or she handled the situation. In my case, a prudent health professional would have done something completely different than what actually happened. They would have immediately let me know what was wrong, admitted that they did not have the necessary tools to help me, and would have sent me to the hospital in Dallas that night. Konvicka mentions that health care providers will often try to convince the patient that they themselves have made a mistake and it wasn’t their fault at all. This exact thing happened to me as the doctor told me I wasn’t “specific enough” when explaining what was wrong. I am not a medical professional and, at the time, could barely talk. It most definitely was not my fault that they don’t care enough to help me.
According to Rosenbaum & Associates, a medical malpractice law firm, 89 percent of the physicians they interviewed believed their malpractice suit was unwarranted. It is not surprising that many of them do not believe they should be sued, however, this means 11 percent of them knew that they should be sued. It baffles me that even one percent of physicians whom are sued know they did something wrong. This proves they are aware of a mistake and/or negligence. The same source also added that only 62% of respondents believe the outcome of the trial was fair for both sides.
I did not sue for malpractice because everything ended up okay for me and my family, and in the grand scheme of things, it was not that big of a deal. However, it could have been very different if my mom had not taken me back to the hospital the next day. After reading about malpractice trials for about a week, I do not believe my family would have won the case. It is very difficult to prove, since they did not perform any procedures on me aside from the “tests” they ran. I do not know exactly what would have happened had I not received the medical care I required, but according to the doctor in Dallas, I was “very lucky” I went back to the hospital.