The female e gas passer who accidentally stopped my heart (and caused the abortion of a key time senstivie operation) verbally apologized as I was coming out of her anesthesia. Her remorse was real and it reached me, even through the haze. My left arm hasn't worked right for going on to six years.

Someone else in my time of medical crisis -- EMT, doctor, janitor -- botched an emergency airway procedure and left me with a paralyzed vocal cord. When I was well enough to ask for a name of who was reponsible and even the barest details of how this happened , you could hear the institutional gears grind as all th doors slammed shut. Suddenly I was being openly lectured by nurses, doctors, clerks, everyone in the business about how lucky I was to still be alive.

Maybe so. But I made my living a a televisiion reporter -, a career path closed off to me now.

To the person(?s) who paralyzed my vocal cord and his/her colleagues who protected her: FUCK YOU.

Fuck you all. I'd shout it, if I could. I watch re-runs of Scrubs now, with an entirely new perspective.

Take your feelings, hop in the BMW and go drive off a cliff.

was this an elective procedure or an emergency one?

Muzza,

I'd be angry about your experience, too.

Why do you say "his/her colleagues who protected HER"? Since you don't know who hurt your vocal cords, how on earth do you know it was a woman? And why do you go out of your way to call your anesthesiologist "the female gas-passer"?

Your post reeks of misogyny.

maybe muzza was being post-sexist and demonstrating how muzza didn't just *assume* the doctors were male?

Splendiferous, I called the "female gass passer' a female, because she was a woman. I called her a "gas passer" because I'm not certain I know how to spell anetheseologist and the spell check( and cut and paste) disappeared from my screen.

Actually, if you re-read the post you may catch my inference that I respected her aplogizing to my face, unlike the the people of unknown provenance who destroyed my voice. Whether this voice event occured under first responder conditions or was a hospital event I still have not been able to determine.

that's answer enough. If it was a first-responder situation, and they had to intubate you on the scene outside of a hospital, that means it was a very serious situation, where if they did NOT intubate you, you might have died. They don't just intubate you for the heck of it.

It's too bad your vocal cords were damaged, but not knowing the situation, it sounds like you ARE lucky to be alive, and if you are unable to speak clearly, at least you are alive to type.

Why, again, do you want to sue the person that saved your life?

I have no wish to sue. Seems to be your first concern.

An account of the facts would help a lot. Can't get one.

muzza:

I have no wish to sue. Seems to be your first concern.

An account of the facts would help a lot. Can't get one.

I'd like you to let the anger go. It's not helping you, but dragging you backwards.

There might not BE a great account of the facts in a trauma. What if one person put in a tube, it didn't work and a more experienced person replaced it - then you got to the O.R. and they replaced it with a different one? Who is at fault? All of them? I doubt any of them would KNOW they screwed up anything, intubating people in a trauma situation isn't that refined. Again, I don't really care if you sue anyone -- i'm not involved -- but for your sake I think you should move on.

Are you angry because you can't get an accounting of the facts that suits your anger or that you can't get any accounting of the facts?

As someone who has intubated hundreds of people in pre-hospital settings ranging from oil rigs to hanging upside down in wrecked cars on the freeway intubating patients trapped in cars, I have no doubt that, had I not taken the risk and intubated these people, they wouldn't have been around to complain about how I did it. You can have a bad outcome when everything is done completely correctly. Which sounds like the case here. It is not always 'someone's fault.' Perhaps you never should have put yourself in the situation where you needed to be intubated in the field?

It never ceases to amaze me that people who receive the best care become convinced that something must have gone wrong, that someone must have screwed up, because they didn't get the result they wanted or expected. Grow up. The world is not without risks.

"The female e gas passer"? And your spell-checker didn't work? Neither did your copy and paste?

You are a misogynist AND a coward that cannot stand behind his own words.

I am actually glad your operation went bad. Really, I am. And by the way, I am a doctor.

It's fun to think about, but you don't really mean that.