Story of a tragedy

 Coming soon:

 Answers For Lisa: The book.

An overview

 

By David Baker
Posted June 2, 2025

    Every year, thousands of people lose their lives as result of preventable medical errors.  In 2000, the Academy of Medicine in its report To Err is Human estimated that in the United States at least 48,000 and as many as 98,000 patients die each year. Twenty years later, a follow-up study found that very little had changed.

   This is the story of one of those deaths.

   It’s the story of a nurse who ignored a physician’s direct, written instructions and the hospital’s printed protocol in treating  an episode of hypoglycemia  - low blood glucose - in a patient with diabetes.

   It’s the story of how that patient would have experienced the shear terror of knowing that her blood glucose was dangerously low and that without help she was going to die.

   It’s the story of how pages documenting what had happened were removed from the patient’s chart.

   It’s the story of a doctor at a nearby hospital was paid to state under oath that the nurse who, in ignoring those instructions, did not fail to meet the standard of care - even though the patient received a catastrophic brain injury and died as a direct result of the nurse’s negligence.

    It’s the story of a hospital management that for three years fought a claim of wrongful death, insisting that its own medical records documenting a near-zero glucose level were wrong, and, how the testimony of that other doctor was all an impatient judge needed to dismiss the entire claim. 

   It’s the story of how, just five months later, another patient with diabetes died in the same hospital in shockingly similar circumstances.

   It’s the story of a lawyer who took the case - then abandoned it without notice. And how another, high-profile attorney called offering to take a look at the claim, then tried  - and nearly succeeded - in getting it thrown out of court.

   It’s the story of a local media that ignored dozens of lawsuits against the area’s medical facilities -  some of the more than 200 of them will be published in the book as they should have been in a newspaper - while running endless ads for those facilities.

   Above all, this is the story of a horrific death at the hands of a hospital management that puts its public image above the lives of patients in its care.

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