Collateral Damage: A Patient, a New Procedure and the Learning Curve

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Day after day after day Pam lay in a coma.

Hugh Calkins would occasionally make an appearance when a new family member arrived.  When Pam’s sister flew in from Seattle, he told her the same story that he’d told the rest of us: that he’d turned away momentarily during the procedure and the catheter got caught in her mitral valve muscles.

Sorry, he says, again and again, but now it was starting to have a ring of tough luck to it. Sorry. Oops. Oh, well.  And as the days wore on, we began to see less and less of Hugh Calkins.