I left the hospital after finishing my last shift before trial with good wishes from everyone at the hospital. The whole ED staff had been a tremendous support. Having a close-knit team working with you makes a huge difference in your confidence. Some times it was as if they could see that I started second guessing myself. Every one of them was supportive. “C’mon, WhiteCoat,” they would say, “if you didn’t catch that, you know damn well that no one else would have done so, either.” Emotional support is so important when going through litigation.
Another interesting twist in the case was that one of the nurses I work with had actually worked with the plaintiff’s expert witness. When she heard that he was the plaintiff’s expert, she would tell me “you’re SUCH a better doctor than he was — half the times he didn’t even examine the patients. He just stood in the doorway and asked them a few questions, then left.”
Don’t suppose there’s any way I can work that into his cross examination. Oh well.
In the years leading up to trial, I learned the importance of emotional support in dealing with the litigation process. On one hand, you can’t go it alone or the emotions will fester up inside of you. On the other hand, talking about why you are being sued makes you feel like you are admitting your inadequacies. Tough to talk about. You’re a doctor. You’re supposed to be smart, nice, and always right. No room for error when dealing with people’s lives. Difficult to reconcile that we’re looked down upon if we misdiagnose a problem, but we’re still human. Definitely leads to stress. We don’t want to be human, but we are.
So during the past three years, my family has had to deal with my intermittent mood swings, episodes of me beating a punching bag in our basement so hard the first floor of the house shakes, and frustration whenever I hear about the patient’s disease in medical journals or on the internet.
A hug, a kiss, and gentle words from my wife put everything back in perspective.
She’s the best. What would I do without her?
I sat at home like a lost soul the days before trial. Do I really want to do this? Yes. I’ve gone this far, I’m not bailing out now. It’s on.
Then I get a phone call from Vinny. The trial date is postponed. There goes pair of Jockey shorts #2.
“Are you kidding me? Why?”
“The plaintiff’s attorney chose to reject the first judge. Now we get put back in line to await assignment of another judge.”
OK, can anyone slop a little more stress on my back? I can take it. Really.
Fortunately for me, that delay allows me to cover a 24 hour shift for someone who was unable to work at the rural hospital where I moonlight. Good. It will get my mind off of things.
Those hopes were short-lived. Late in the afternoon, I get an urgent call from Vinny telling me I have to be in court at 8:30 AM the next morning. My shift ends at 8 AM and it’s a two hour drive to the city without traffic. No problem. After a bunch of phone calls, I get someone to relieve me at 12:30 AM. At least I’ll be able to go home and catch some sleep.
I’m wide awake on the way home, excited to finally get this trial over with.
I get a few hours of sleep that night, but I woke up early and couldn’t go back to sleep. I kept checking the clock, afraid I would sleep through the alarm. Finally I decided to just get up and take a shower.
After I got done drying off, I looked in the mirror, and . . . wonderful. My nose decided to celebrate Christmas a little early. I have a big honking zit on the tip of my nose. It’s not the kind you can squeeze, either. It’s this big red thing that makes me look like Rudolph. Ho friggin’ ho ho.
I clench my jaw and can feel the pressure building up in my head. I’m standing in a towel, so the punching bag in the basement is out for the moment. So I do what every other respectable guy would do in the same situation — I curse at the top of my lungs. The fillings in my mouth vibrated. My wife came running into the bathroom.
“Are you hurt?”
“No I’m not hurt. Look at my damn nose!”
“What the hell is wrong with you? All the kids just heard your little outburst, you know. Heck, probably the idiot neighbors down the street that always screech their tires in the middle of the night heard it. You happy now?”
“Good. I hope I woke them up — the idiot neighbors, not the kids.”
“Oooh. The jury’s just going to love you this morning.”
“Yeah. Especially the volcano on the tip of my nose.”
My wife whipped out a makeup kit and did a Hollywood makeup job on me. In no time, I felt like a movie star and looked like … well … let’s just say that the zit on my nose was a lot less noticeable.
I pulled my dress clothes out of the closet and realized that I hadn’t worn a suit in quite a while. Kind of nice wearing pajamas to work all the time. You get spoiled. Unfortunately, unless you’re Dr. Oz, scrubs aren’t cool out in public. On second thought, just scratch the whole “Dr. Oz” exception. Scrubs aren’t cool in public period. Sorry, Dr. Oz.
My suit was a little tight around the chest, though, so I tried a different one. That one was a little snug, too. My rippling pecs were pulling at the seams. Oh, well. I’ll just have to remember not to flex too suddenly.
My wife adjusted my collar, straightened my tie and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “You’re going to do fine.” The kids came up and each one hugged a leg. They probably didn’t know why they were doing it, but I got the impression that they could sense the tension in the air. It felt good to know they were pulling for me. Boy do I owe them a vacation when this is all over.
Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to court I go.
(read previous posts in this series here)
this subject aggravates me enough to almost be unable to read your posts. but thanks for sharing anyway.
Agreed. I have flashbacks to my so-called case. That so little of this is concentrated on the facts of what occurred as opposed to trying to trip someone up in memory inconsequential details months and even years after the fact is infuriating. That appearance and nationality can make or break a case is ridiculous. I would be perfectly fine if the case was about, oh I don’t know, the case, but mine most assuredly was not. And most of what WhiteCoat has talked about so far isn’t either.
I am getting flash backs too about my case – and I never went to actual court even.
Sending a support shout of, “hang in there” from Oregon City, Oregon.
What would happen if you had moved across the country shortly after you saw this patient? Would you have to travel back to the original town for all of this? I suppose you’d have to pay for all the travel too.
If the plaintiff loses do you get to charge them for lost wages? Do you get to charge them for lawyer fees? Or would that be considered mean and unfair?
Again, thanks for sharing this journey with us.
Whitecoat,
This is so painful. Your account of the process is entirely accurate. I fully empathize. I had a trial last year. They said prepare for 2 weeks starting in April. To be responsible and to give the trial my attention I took myself off the schedule. Apparently one of the lawyers was able to get a postponement for Oct 1. There is real life and schedules. Court life and schedules operate in a parallel universe. For October I took myself off the schedule for 2 weeks. The trial didn’t get rolling until mid October, then it went for 7 weeks. It caused havoc with the schedule as my partners had to do my shifts for 2 months. I was able to get in some nights and weekends so I could still pay the bills. It was filed in a different county and was a 4 hour daily commute. The plaintiff expert was a disengenious asswipe. The plaintiff lawyers were asswipes, largely because they beleived the ridiculous stuff the expert asswipe said. I prevailed in a unanimous defense verdict. Afterward the jury felt awful that I had to go through that. They were very disgusted at the whole process. That was little consolation. I lost 2-3 months of income and now I have no desire to work as much as I previously did. My kids suffered, my wife suffered, my health suffered, my work suffered. I could not sleep without Ambien. I sought help from family, my church, , a shrink, a hypnotist. Nothing really seems to help. A year later I am feel like I am still trying to repair my marriage and relationship with my kids, and regain my joy and confidence at work.
My lawyers told me never to discuss the case. My partners knew what I was going through but nursing staff still doesn’t know what went on. They comment on why I turned grouchy, appeared unhappy, etcetera.
I am enjoying your blogging although it brings back painful memories. It would be too painful for me to do and you are much more articulate then I. We need some type of outlet. Please keep the rant going.
Doctors are not used to this, so they are upset. Doctors are among the most privileged and immunized defendants of all. Say a practice has a gross income of $5 million. It has 4 lawsuits at any one time. Very upset.
Say a welding or a store business or any other business has a gross revenue of $5 million a year. It has 400 lawsuits every day. As one is settled or dropped, another comes in the door.
Dealing with the land pirates is a part of doing business every day. One’s attitude should be to view them as Mafia extortionists coming to the store to demand protection money. They are not even human, and doing extreme damage to them (legally) has total moral and legal justification. They are also bullies. When they experience a little pain, they do not come around.
If you had pestilential vermin in your store, would be traumatized? No. You would accept the reality, and get the exterminator. In the case of the lawyer, the exterminator is another lawyer. The latter refuses to eradicate the pestilence because he would lose his job.
Doctors should serve as the spear point in a phalanx of a coalition of lawsuit abuse victims. They should seek to end the self-dealing case law protecting the land pirates. Failing that, they should organize shunning and boycott campaigns to drive out the internal enemy from town. Failing that, patient and customer direct action groups should take direct action to these immunized cult criminals.
There is a group with better immunity than the doctor. The lawyer and the judge. No one may reach them, not even victims of legal malpractice. It is impossible to win a legal malpractice case, unless one is another lawyer. The court is rigged airtight not in favor of the plaintiff, but in favor of the lawyers on both sides, to churn litigation so every one of them can get a taste.
I do not advocate murder. They would love it, to lose a competitor and to split their pie fewer ways. I do advocate legal countermeasures to deter them.
The plaintiff is allowed to reject the assigned judge?! That’s totally asinine! What state is this?
Every jurisdiction I’m aware of gives any party to a lawsuit the right to reject the judge, with or without cause, once.
It’s generally only used in extreme circumstances though because you must really not like that judge otherwise there is always a possibility you will get someone worse and then you’re stuck.
Ain’t that way in Pennsylvania.
Not in Massachusetts or Washington, either.
I’m reading this account, and the comments of others, with an open mind, and mixed feelings.
I come from many worlds – that of an ex-RN, ex-wife of a medical specialist with a substantial medico-legal practice, and now as the daughter of a woman who was seriously undertreated – to the point of negligence – in two Australian hospitals.
What I’m not enjoying, is the adversarial, ‘us and them’ vibe, which permeates much of what I’ve read here.
It’s 20+ years since I worked in the A&E, ICU, and other specialist units. The culture in which medicine and nursing exist and are practiced, remains almost unchanged.
Perhaps we all need to dust off our copies of ‘The House of God’, and maybe even David Wootton’s ‘Bad Medicine’.
If you’re interested, our experiences are chronicled here:
http://margihealing.wordpress.com/2009/05/20/medical-negligence-and-the-meaning-of-life/
Margi Macdonald
These posts are so good, WC. The part where you said, “we don’t want to be human, but we are,” just sums up everyone that goes into the field to help others. If only people understood.
Reading about this horrible time in your life helps those who read, to think about what it is to actually have to suffer through something so harmful. It hurts in all areas of your life, as Chuckie has posted.
Chuckie, I’m sorry you had to go through such a thing. Please don’t lose sight of all the good you have done. All the lives you have touched in positive ways. There are positive ripples you aren’t even aware of. There are still people that need you, and are grateful for the help. Don’t let them take anymore from you (your family relationships, your self esteem, etc.) than they already have. I wish you healing.
While you go through this, please keep something in your back pocket which you can pull out and look at whenever you feel most depressed about medicine. What I’d like you to put in your back pocket are a few cases where you made a huge difference–the 50 y.o. who you shocked and resuscitated through VT; the kid whose epidural you found quickly enough that he had no sequelae; the septic grandmother who had no right to survive, but got tubed, lined, labbed and antibiotics so efficiently that she survived to be with her family again.
Pull those out when the opposing lawyer is saying what a miserable wretch you are and know that you have and will make an incredible difference in the lives of your patients.
God Bless.
“They are not even human, and doing extreme damage to them (legally) has total moral and legal justification.”
When I was doing my training at a major university, there was a joke going around.
They wanted to use lawyers as experimental animals and had several good reasons; Their metabolism is closer to human than other animals, even chimpanzees. None of the animal rights people would ever make a fuss about experiments on lawyers. You can get lawyers to do things that no self-respecting lab rat would do. They’re cheap; almost everybody is trying to get rid of them. They’re cheap to feed; they’ll eat anything, including each other. Best of all, your experiments will be uncomplicated by other pathogenic organisms because of professional courtesy.
What’s the difference between a dead dog in the road and a dead lawyer in the road?
Skid marks in front of the dog.
One more, one more:
What do you call a bus load of lawyers with one empty seat on it going over a cliff?
A missed opportunity.
Thank you, thank you–tip your waiters, I’ll be here all week!
Surely you guys can do better than these old ones. No one has any fresh material?
The biggest joke is on the American public. It the lawyer profession itself, the cause of all economic problems and social pathologies, seeking the destruction of our way of life.
It’s true. We even have a fortress in a cave.
Not new … but very old material.
“Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. As a peacemaker the lawyer has superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.”
Abraham Lincoln
[...] Coat’s Call Room — the author of which is going through his own malpractice lawsuit — has picked up and run with the discussion we started over whether emergency physicians [...]
And 9/11 was an all lawyer betrayal, too, coming and going. The lawyer intentionally crippled our intelligence, prevented the destruction of the enemy before they could attack, consumed 1000’s of hours of Clinton’s time on a bogus impeachment, then embedded themselves with our warriors to protect the terrorist from destruction. The lawyer canceled military orders down to the squad level. Now, the lawyer prosecutes our warriors and wants to give terrorist full legal rights. The reason for all this betrayal? To generate lawyer jobs, power, and enrichment.
Come the next terrorist attack, accounts get settled with the lawyer.
The doctor should remember. When he counterattacks the lawyer, he is defending our country from an internal enemy. The innocent doctor should not only resist to the utmost, but must bring the fight to the enemy. As this enemy gives no quarter to our nation, so none should even be considered.
White Coat, malpractice litigation is a horror, the legal system is an obscenity.
There is no hope it will change while prey are still available, and predators agree loosely not to feed on one another.
Leave, quit, get out before you are exsanguinated. Use your knowledge to keep yourself and loved ones as healthy as possible.
Take as many of your brethren with you as possible.
“Strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
Joshua aka WOPR
“WarGames”
Oh!Doc99– What a good observation!
Susan: There is no justification for the self-dealt immunities of the lawyers and judges. The sole reasoning is that the sovereign speaks with the voice of God. That is a psychotic delusion as a justification. It also violates the Establishment Clause.
This is not loser pays. This is loser pays for his carelessness and the damage done to the adverse third party, and deviations from professional standards of due care. The filing of a weak case is legal malpractice. The overwhelming majority of case are weak. The class of plaintiff lawyers owes the class of innocent defendants exemplary damages as well as all legal costs.
Why do chatty lawyers get all silent when the subject of the benefits of torts for lawyers comes up?
Because when people start deviating into the Bill Clinton, 9/11 conspiracy theories, there’s not much point in engaging them. The reservation is far behind them. Be happy with the followers you do have.
Matt: The lawyer is the one that believes 1) minds can be read, even those of drunken criminals; 2) the future of rare accident can be forecast; 3) 12 strangers can detect the truth by their gut feelings, after all those with any knowledge have been excluded; 4) that a fictional character, the prudent person, sets our standard of prudence, he with the personality of Mickey Mouse, but really a lawyer code word for Jesus Christ, a model of behavior forbidden by the Establishment Clause; 5) that lawyer hierarchy is immune from any accountability, with the sole justification for such a privilege being, they speak with the voice of God.
Your profession has psychotic delusions. It imposes them on the public at the point of a gun. The latter is the sole validation of your psychotic core doctrines. Your profession is cuckoo, but unfortunately totally controls the three branches of government. Elected officials are all figureheads, allowed to make 1% of decisions for show.
The lawyer hierarchy used indoctrination techniques in law school to get modern students like you to buy this Medieval garbage. Worse. You did not even know the indoctrination took place. Worse. If you are Catholic, you failed to notice that these elements come word for word from the Catechism, including the word, elements.
Tort reform for lawyers could start with the Bar adopting the same professional standards to which they hold all others.
1.Judges need to be held liable for malpractice. Losing on appeal is malpractice on its face.
2.Abuse of process and malicious prosecution suits need to allow for (at least) recovery of attorney fees as damages. Few can afford the 6-figure costs of civil litigation with statutory bans on recovery of costs.
3.Legal malpractice,abuse of process, or malicious prosecution claims need to allow damages for mental anguish, pain and suffering, and non-accrued(assumed future) damages the same as other professions’ malpractice exposure.
1. Lawyers do not hold others to a standard that is set by lawyers. The standard of care is set by the defendant’s profession itself in a
professional negligence case of any kind.
2. If a case goes up on appeal and is overturned, the person gets another chance. Where is the malpractice damage.
3. Abuse of process/malicious prosecution suits are typically taken on contingency. If you want them to recover a statutory fee as well write your legislator.
4. Pain and suffering damages in most states require a physical harm first. Are you suggesting we expand the ease of obtaining those damages? Future losses are available if you can prove them.
“Judges need to be held liable for malpractice. Losing on appeal is malpractice on its face.”
By this reasoning, I assume you feel that the doctor has committed malpractice whenever the patient has an adverse outcome?