The Persecution

Oh, the PI business. It's provided a wonderful living for my family, but the more I really look into cases and what they mean (particularly medical malpractice ones), the more I think the Republicans are right about tort reform...

Yesterday I attended the deposition of Dr. Barry's chief accuser, a nebbish academic doctor up in North Carolina.

Dr. Barry handled a case 5 years ago, last Christmas. A ghetto Mom in Lauderdale spilled boiling water on her baby, and took the baby to a Broward hospital. The staff at the Broward hospital gave poor care, as many Broward hospitals are wont to do. They inserted a line into the child's vein, and turfed the kid to Barry's hospital.

Probably from the bad line insertion, the child developed an infection and a weird vessell disorder. Barry asked a surgeon to look at the boy's leg. The surgeon said it would be fine. That was all Barry was required to do. It would have killed the child, quite literally.

Barry, relying on his years of experience (he once told me a kid playing video games never gets to stay in the ICU) knew something wasn't right. So he asked for a different surgeon to evaluate the child. This one knew if he didn't operate, the vessel in the child's leg would burst, and the toddler would become one less inner city denizen of Fort Lauderdale...

The surgery was done, and the life was saved, thanks to Dr. Barry. So the mother dropped to her knees, praised Jesus (it never gets old when my Black clients do this) and then hugged Barry, to thank him for saving the life of the child HER neglect nearly killed.

Ha! Not so fast! She hired a Black Muslim lawyer from a firm in West Palm (the guy's voice is an exact copy of the Johnny Cochran character from "Seinfeld") and sued everyone who saw the boy. The Broward hospital and its doctors already settled for a moderate sum.

And so the case continues. Dr. Barry will win at trial, I believe, although the counsel his employer hired is a heavyweight only literally, not as a lawyer. (Why are my friends and I so juvenile and cruel that fat girl jokes never get old?).

The case will probably settle, although Dr. Barry was already through the ringer. The State Health Department selected his case randomly as one to investigate, and Dr. Barry's employer had to hire another lawyer (this one also a little zaftig, but also a legal heavyweight) to get the claim dismissed.

Also, any money Dr. Barry's Department pays to settle will come out of their budget, where it would have been used to pay for, quite literally, more lifesaving equipment for other kids, and maybe even another doctor in the overworked ICU.

Dr. Barry practiced good medicine, not defensive medicine, with this child. Ironically, had he played the case by the defensive medicine book, and only called the one surgeon in, the boy would be gone.

The nebbish expert in North Carolina has already been paid over $15 thousand dollars by the Muslim lawyer. To a back country hack like him, that's serious scratch. Hence, his motivation for testifying against Barry.

I tell the girls all the time that life isn't fair. I'm just thrilled neither of them wants to become a physician...