A Sea of Broken Hearts

A Sea of Broken Hearts

Preface

     I am fearful of writing the story you are about to read. As I begin putting words into my computer, I wonder if I’ll be able to finish telling it to you. At a minimum I will be revisited often by the grief monster that has stalked me since the day in September 2002 when my 19-year-old son Alex died. At times I can keep that monster at a safe distance, but all too often I am suddenly caught in its net and pulled into profound anguish. I have learned to let the monster feast on my heart until I am numb and my spiritual blood has run out, and then I can push it away for a little while longer. Telling Alex’s story, and knowing that millions of other Americans have suffered and died over the years because of their medical care, invites the monster’s return.

     No one in the world wishes more than I do that it could be said that my son received reasonable care at the hands of his cardiologists. Alex was in their “care” for 5 days and endured all the testing they asked for, yet they gave him no diagnosis or treatment. Only 2 ½ weeks after seeing his last physician, he was lying on the running trail at his university with the last breath of life gone from his body. You and those you love are likely to have their lives in the hands of a cardiologist someday. Will you fear that cardiologist, or will you trust him? I trusted my son’s cardiologists, and that’s the biggest mistake I have ever made. As the mystery of his death unfolded I found an incredible conspiracy of ignorance and complicity among other cardiologists and physicians.

     You might imagine that the chances that you will be personally affected by a medical error are small, but they are not small. In the year after Alex died 685,000 Americans died of heart disease and another 557,000 died of cancer. A convincing case can be made that the next leading cause of death in America is the medical care system (I am not the first to make this assertion). These are errors of omission and commission, and not all are preventable. Estimates in leading medical journals and reviews are as follows: deaths of outpatients due to therapeutic drug use, 199,000; deaths of hospitalized patients due to therapeutic drug use, 106,000; deaths of heart failure patients that could have been avoided by administering beta-blockers, 100,000; deaths due to hospital-acquired infections, 80,000; and deaths due to medical errors documented in medical records of inpatients, 98,000. No doubt there is some overlap in the deaths covered by these estimates, but it is clear that medical errors easily constitute the 3^rd leading cause of death in the U.S., well ahead of the 158,000 who die from cerebral vascular disease. I’ll write more about the basis of these estimates later. If you know someone who died of heart disease or cancer, then you know someone who died from a medical error. The only difference is that the American medical system is adept at concealing its mistakes, so you are not aware that that person died of a medical error. The American medical community knows that these errors exist, but patients do not.

     I am not a cardiologist, but I am a Ph.D. pathologist and a board-certified toxicologist. During my son’s illness I knew very little cardiology and had no choice except to trust his doctors. I never set out to discover that they had given him awful medical care. Their last recommendation was that he should be tested for a genetic disease, and when he died a few weeks later it became very important that I obtain his medical records and determine if his younger sister and brother were at risk. When I received those records, I immediately saw that they contained false statements and were grossly incomplete. That started my journey from one troubling discovery to another as I compared Alex’s records, which I eventually obtained in complete form, with information in medical texts and medical literature. I have had the benefit of access to a medical library and to discussions with physicians working for the sam