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DOCTORED EVIDENCE
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"Oh my God."
These are not words a patient wants to hear from his doctor during a medical procedure. Larry Conkel was undergoing a myocardial biopsy. He was sedated, strapped to a padded table, and surrounded by people in masks. A long plastic tube, which minutes before had been inserted in a vein in Larry's neck, was being delicately coaxed by his doctor through a valve in Larry's heart.
"Jugular intercourse," Larry had joked nervously when the
catheter was inserted. Dr. Bernard had politely chuckled. Now, the doctor's mild oath transformed the relatively carefree atmosphere of the early minutes of the procedure to one of alarm and confusion. The remark was muttered under the doctor's breath, whispered, but it was enough to send a whiplash of fear through everyone in the room, including the patient, despite the sedation he was under. Then Bernard said it again, much louder.
"Oh, my God!"
Something had gone dreadfully wrong, something that had never happened before in Dr. Edward Bernard's twenty years as a cardiologist. The catheter had broken up. The plastic tube in Larry Conkel's vein had fallen to pieces. Shards of various shapes and sizes bounced and spun inside his flaccid, oversizes ventricle and went shooting through his pulmonary valve toward his innocent lungs....
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Twenty minutes later, Larry Conkel was in an operating room, prepped for surgery, with his hand on the wrist of a thin, middle-aged nurse holding an anesthesia mask. The nurse knew who Larry Conkel was. He worked at Shoreview Memorial, as the hospital's chief financial officer. He had a wife and two children. He also had an enlarged heart, the reason he was in the hospital as a patient that day, which happened to be his fortieth birthday. Just before he was anesthetized, Larry looked up into the kind, concerned eyes of the nurse, and spoke.
"Nurse," he said quietly.
She leaned forward to hear him. "Yes, Mr. Conkel?"
"If I don't make it out of surgery, tell Karen Hayes in the Legal Department to look in on Walter."
The nurse smiled and patted the back of Larry's hand.
"You'll be fine, Mr. Conkel," she said.
Four hours later, Larry Conkel was pronounced dead. Within another hour, every person working at Shoreview Memorial knew what had happened to Larry.
Only one knew why.
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LAWYERED TO DEATH
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Arthur Winslow sat in a molded plastic chair in a hallway on the fourth floor of Shoreview Memorial Hospital feeling anxious, exhausted an vaguely embarrassed. The fourth floor contained the psychiatric unit. Three doctors were down the hall in a patient room, examining Arthur's wife, Lorraine. Arthur was the CEO of the hospital, but he had to sit in the hallway while three guys in white coats poked, prodded and pawed his wife....
Arthur had come home from work late the previous evening to a prickly reception from his wife, followed by a fusillade of paranoid accusations over cocktails, a dinner of cold poached salmon accompanied by bitter sarcasm, and strawberries with belligerence for dessert. Lorraine, who had long been argumentative, had become increasingly so over the past year, ever since her hospitalization for depression. For months she had been moody and irritable. A procession of prescription medications had not made a dent in her erratic behavior.
With the after-dinner Cointreau, Lorraine had begun ranting and shrieking. When she attempted to rise from her seat to make a point about something or other, she stumbled and collapsed like a fumbled marionette. Reaching out to break her fall, she sustained a compound fracture of the radius in her left arm and her forehead grazed the corner of the mahogany dining room table on the way down. When Arthur tried to help her up, he noticed the twitching in her fingers and worried that the clunk on her forehead might be worse than it looked, so he called an ambulance. The ambulance took her to the Shoreview Memorial emergency room, the the all-night vigil began.
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