Ten years ago my mother died of ovarian cancer. As she suffered through chemotherapy, she wrote a deposition in long hand in which she described the actions of her first doctor and asked her children to take action against him if she died. This “doctor” had postponed a critical CAT scan when she first felt a mass in her abdomen because he said he would be embarrassed if it turned out to be only impacted stool in the bowel. Because of his inaction, this very fast-growing type of cancer had almost an additional week to attack her. Finally, he scheduled her for surgery with a very good cancer surgeon. But it was too late. She suffered nearly six months on chemotherapy. I’ll spare you the detaials of that horror. Those of you who have nursed a loved one through it know how terrible it is. She lost her battle, and my siblings and I lost a wonderful mother at least partly because an arrogant son of a bitch who called himself a doctor didn’t want to be embarrassed.
The family was very much shaken by the loss of our mother, and the deposition was first shunted aside in the rush of details of funeral preparation and settling her estate, then forgotten until I ran across it a while ago. Legal action is now impossible, but I wrote a letter to the doctor in the hope of at least shaming him. Now I don’t know whether it’s even a good idea to send the leter. It won’t change anything. And the likelihood is that such an arrogant person will not be moved anyway. But a little venting won’t do any harm, unless the bastard somehow feels threatened. I was careful not to be theatening in any way.
The letter follows:
Dr. _____
You are a very lucky man. Lucky because I didn’t run across the enclosed letter more than ten years ago after my mother, your patient, _______ ____ died of ovarian cancer. Our entire family were so aggrieved by her loss that we simply forgot the deposition (enclosed) that my sister and I had both witnessed. Ours is not a family that sues people, not even people like you, who like to call themselves healers, but who are in fact merely businessmen (in the meanest sense of that word). At any rate, the statute of limitations has made the issue moot.
Nevertheless I want you to know that we hold you morally, if not medically responsible for the death of our mother. If it were not for your vanity, if you had acted with urgency as you should, the nature of Mom’s problem (ovarian cancer) would have been discovered almost a week before it was. During that week, the rapidly growing cancer increased its hold on her body, to the extent that Dr. __________ could not remove enough of it. It had already attacked the bowel, something that might not have happened if your actions had been more timely.
The details are in the deposition. You failed to act for almost a week because it have “embarrassed” you if the CAT scan had turned up only stool in the bowel. Your arrogance cost the life of a much better person than you. I hope that if your own mother is still living she never finds herself in the hands of a “doctor” like you. And I hold out the vain hope that you have the decency to be embarrassed now.
Larry ____, on behalf of Sherry, Jim and Ted (her other children) and a large extended family who still grieve for her.
What you you think I should do? Send it? Forget it?