Cover
A Work in Progress …
Table of Contents
Preview: CHAPTER ONE
Johns Hopkins Medicine has a long tradition of prioritizing patients, and striving for the bottom rung are the anonymous poor. If, for example, you catch a bullet on a Baltimore street corner, or your mother presents you at the ER as a feverish welfare child, then it’s open season for the med students - well meaning as they may be. They can practice on you because after you’re dead or mangled, nobody’s going to look into your case precisely because… you are a nobody.
At the other end of the spectrum are wealthy and prominent patients, who get treated by doctors who have already learned what not to do from the mistakes inflicted upon the lower classes.
My wife landed somewhere in the middle. We got snookered by all the hype from US News into thinking we were going 
to be treated by the best doctor at “The Best Hospital in America.” Dr. Hugh G. Calkins, Boy Genius, was to maneuver tiny wires around in my wife’s heart and burn scar tissue in there to stop atrial fibrillation. The job required someone with a cool head and a keen eye, and Doc Calkins assured us that he had done plenty of these procedures. So we knew we were in the best of hands. What we didn’t know is that Doc Calkins - according to what he later told colleagues - follows the practice at most teaching hospitals wherein “the attending shows up to be there during the burn.”
So while Hugh Calkins was presumably down in the doctor’s lounge relaxing with colleagues — or out selling TASER guns – a young electrophysiologist trainee by the name of Richard Wu - whom we’d never met - was fumbling around with a new type of catheter. It appears that young Wu wasn’t sure into which heart chamber the catheter was supposed to be inserted. He went for the left ventricle (it says right on the box to not do that) and the catheter got tangled in the muscles of her mitral valve.
Her chart read : “only the first 50% of the circular portion of the catheter tip could be withdrawn into the sheath, and pulsatile motion could be appreciated.” Pulsatile motion. They were trying to cajole the catheter back into its sheath, but it was tugging back like they’d hooked a five pound bass.
A nurse noted here that the “patient is waking and moving around, with chest pain @ 7/10.”
Imagine that.
