Trust

In the last few months, the newspaper chain that I work for has run three articles about people who were paralyzed or killed due to a doctor's mistake that shouldn't have happened. Someone just wasn't paying attention and gave the wrong dosage of something.

It's very hard for all of us to go through life constantly asking questions, protecting everyone, being suspicious. We want to trust experts.

Yet it seems like in dealing with a professional on any important matter, you always have to be on the ball. Even if it means being a pest. I hate that, but it's true.

There have been times when I've been on the phone dealing with a professional from, say, the IRS or Dell computer, when they told me something that didn't seem quite right. I would have been happy to finally get off the phone and do what they said, but I asked a few more questions. And finally something clicked and they realized they needed to give me a better answer. Sometimes asking for someone's supervisor also helped.

I hate having to do that. And why should people have to do that with surgeons and nurses?

I suppose it's because no matter what your individual situation is, a professional is still dealing with hundreds of patients or clients. No one knows your situation better than you.

In a story we wrote in our papers about three weeks ago, a boy who was 12 years old, who played football, got Hodgkin's Disease. It's curable if caught early enough and treated with chemo. Most of his treatments went fine.

On the very last one, they accidentally gave him three times the dose of chemo, just because someone wrote something down wrong.

He immediately felt very sick. He died in agony three weeks later.

The parents just won a multimilliondollar settlement, but they had to watch their son die in pain because of one stupid error that no one caught. He would have been alive today, a survivor, playing high school football and just being a boy.

It's not as if the parents could have been standing there to catch it. It's not as if the kid could have caught it. Or maybe he could have noticed that something wasn't quite right with how much they were giving him, but really, would they have listened to him?

Medical miracles are performed every day, so I'm not dissing doctors, but I guess the point is that unfortunately, we always have to ask questions. I'm still pretty optimistic and harbor a lot of romantic notions, so I hate to have to ask questions all the time. But sometimes you just have to.