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What Happened to your grandmother?

Book CoverBuy the book to find out what could have happened.

 

People die in medical places for no apparent reason; charts buried before they are. MedicalMaladies.com brings them to life on pages to tell their stories, so you can learn from them to take care of yourself, and your loved ones.

Here is a story of one who’d survived in the minefield of medical mistakes:

What happened to Bobby?

At one level the book, Medical Malady, is a true story about a young doctor who had fallen into a black hole of coma. How and what had thrown him into the abyss was a mystery for years. Defying end-of-life predictions he managed to escape his predicament, and woke up three weeks and three days later. The trauma had erased his memory of the episode.

Disabled, he asked the woman, the one who had been with him in his apartment the night of the incident, but she seemed to be hiding something. He asked the doctor-colleagues, who’d treated him in the dead of night, and the days that followed, but they appeared misleading. He asked his parents, who had rushed to his bedside, and brought him back to his home city in an air ambulance, while he was comatose and near-death. But their stories were beyond belief!

Whom could he trust—in his search for the truth, and more importantly, in his search for the path to his altered future? If he believed the woman, would he suffer another lethal episode? How could he trust someone who showed up, but showed no care or concern? If he believed the doctors, he would probably spend the rest of his life as a ward of a social worker. If he believed his parents, he would probably end up in a legal contest! But how could he litigate the specialists that he himself wanted to be?

He was at a fork on the road. What could he do? A dilemma! A dilemma for one fresh out of coma! Yet he had to choose. He must. Time was running out! What did he do? And what was done to him, by those who he thought were his friends?

That is what the book is about. It is a survival story like no other, in overcoming treachery and torment in a sea of beauty and benevolence. You know what is scary? It can happen to anyone who isn’t vigilant!

 

At another level the book, Medical Malady, is about a father searching for the truth behind son’s near-death. Whose fault? His true-life experience helps us learn about medical-legal establishments when things go wrong in treatment of someone you love. Read the Prologue to understand his dilemma.

Bobby was in his Montreal apartment with a woman. He had made the apartment meticulously nut free. Nuts were a deadly poison to him; he was anaphylactic. The woman knew it. They were drinking wine. Then it happened. Suspecting the worst, he jabbed himself with EpiPen, an antidote, and rushed to the ER minutes away. He was a doctor; he could articulate the urgency. Yet, two hour later, he lay on an ICU bed near death, dying. Irony, he was scheduled to work in the same hospital the following morning.

What happened to Bobby? That was the question. Who were telling the truth? The doctors? The Nurses? The Hospitals? His friend? Not one person was forthcoming. A massive hunt uncovered the truth. But then, what happened in the end? Who won? Bobby? The doctors? The hospitals? What? None of them? Then who? The woman? Did her truth corroborate with the evidence?

Now, would a doctor write a book about this? Not if he wants to keep his job. Lawyers? Nah, they make money from all sides! But an engineer outside the bubble of the medical-legal system would. After all, the doctor was his son!

Medical Malady is a survival story. It shows the good, the bad, and the ugly side of our medical-legal system, note: the system. It is not intended to demonize our doctors, nurses, or specialists—granted that there are those who need more training than others—but to help them and their patients, through this story, to be acutely aware and be mindful of simple mistakes that happen daily; mistakes that can have profound long term effect in lives of real people and real families. It could happen to you, or to anyone, including those in healthcare profession. After all, a doctor is a patient in waiting. Time and sickness do not play favourites.

A rare group of publishing professionals helped publish Medical Malady: Survival in a Minefield of Medical Mistakes.

What does this book have to do with your healthcare? Everything! Read it. Share it with someone special.

Find out what happens in your medical system when things go wrong in treatment of someone you love.

“Bobby was the survivor of a medical mistake that changed his life forever. My book, Medical Malady – Survival in a Minefield of Medical Mistakes, tells the story of my son and his ordeals resulting from problems within the medical system that treated him. Through no fault of his own, he went from a healthy young doctor to a brain-injured epileptic and insulin-dependent diabetic.”

It could happen to you!

As you go about your business every day, medical matters are probably the farthest things from your mind. Then it happens. You are brought to reality to deal with personal or family health problems.

You hope that the help you seek doesn’t let you down, and that the system you trust doesn’t betray you. Unfortunately, sometimes it does.

Medical mistakes kill; up to 100,000 die each year in the United States, 24,000 in Canada, and one in ten worldwide (1,2,3). The numbers of serious injuries are even more staggering, which makes the healthcare landscape seem like a minefield of medical mistakes.

Hopefully, it will never happen to you, but if it does, you most likely won’t know what caused such a catastrophe, and they probably won’t tell you.

Being in that situation is lonely—especially when you are so vulnerable, with your most treasured possession: your life, or the life of a loved one hanging in the balance. What do you do? Who do you turn to?

My intent with my book and website is to guide you toward finding some answers, or at least show the way forward—and help you survive to tell your story.

Writing my book was tremendously difficult, but it was also a labour of love—for my son, and for the thousands of others who may have to deal with the difficulties of similar situations.

  1. Institute of Medicine (2000). “To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System (2000)”. The National Academies Press.
  2. Hayward R, Hofer T (2001). “Estimating hospital deaths due to medical errors: preventability is in the eye of the reviewer“.JAMA 286 (4): 415–20.
  3. The Canadian Adverse Events Study: the incidence of adverse events among hospital patients in Canada CMAJ May 25, 2004 vol. 170 no. 11.