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

The Great Chest Tube MysteryA

They cut her all right. They cracked open her chest the way a personal injury lawyer would crack open a lobster to celebrate a class action windfall. This case  had been on Bekman’s back burner for so long, he’d forgotten all about it. It’s another business model: You take all the decent looking cases that come in the door, thereby depriving the competition of the business, and you really don’t have to worry about them until the statute of limitations is suddenly looming.

The expert cardiologists who reviewed the records for Bekman were all Calkins chums from the Afib ablation club.  Asking these docs to testify was laughable. Even if one were inclined to commit professional suicide by calling out a colleague, all he had to go on was a sanitized and exculpatory procedure report.

I would get all the records myself, and I would find out exactly what happened up there, and then I would get another lawyer.