Sudden Deaths

I write this post on a soon-to-be rainy Seattle Sunday thinking about two words which mean so much to me and so little to others.

I have been a victim of what is called in the civil justice system, "medical malpractice." It happened to me many many years ago and took me a long time to move past it enough to talk about it. Some people never do recover from it.

Some people never realize it happened to them, or to their loved ones until it is too late to turn back the clock... too late turn on the burner that re-ignites the spark of life.

Last week a dear friend died of what I guess, and can only guess, to be a bad drug which was prescribed with good intentions. The reason I say I say it is my guess ... is because I have no proof, no evidence, except what he told me last time I saw him.

He had been in the hospital just days earlier.
When he got out and we crossed paths, we held hands and spoke quietly for a while.
I apologized for not going to see him when he was in the hospital. I told him I didn't know what was happening until the day he was released. And I was torn, I said, worried about being intrusive.

He said to me, "Never be shy. Anything helps. A visit, a phone call, a prayer, a thought, a dream." He spent more time talking to me than I to him. He told me life is short and he never realized how short it is until he was admitted to the hospital. He said he hated hospitals and he never wanted to go back. It was the first time I ever heard him say he was scared. He was a mentor to me and many other investigators in this state. I had never considered the possibility he felt fear because I never saw it in him.

I asked him if they knew what caused his rapid decline. He said the doctors said it was the result of some medications he took and stopped.
But the damage was done.

He left the hospital for a short time and he was back in the hospital last week.
He died shortly after. A brilliant, beaming, glow of perfect light.... extinguished.
So I, his family, his wife, kids, grand kids, and all the investigative community of Western Washington who knew him, grieve this weekend.

I lay in bed at night and in the morning and send him.... and all those I love who have passed.... winged prayers to their spirits, which I also like to imagine are still with us.

I want to find out the name of the medicine he took.
Another investigator told me he spoke with our friend about the medicine. While he never gave him the name of the medicine, but our mutual friend did say our deceased friend told him he read the folded package inserts and what happened to him, including death, is a possible side effect.

I have trouble coming to grips with that.

I love medicines and I hate them.

They have healed and sothed me through, loss and pain and surgery of my own.
They have saved the lives of those I love the most after cancers and other diseases try to bring them down.
They are keeping so many people alive who would not be among us today if it were not for the healing powers of medicine.

Pharmaceuticals are a mixed blessing... a mixed blend of positive and negative, yin and yang... life and death in doses.
They are often the deal breaker when it comes to living and dying... and all the stages in between.

Were I a doctor, with a full load of patients and all their concerns, I would be afraid in these litigious times, to do my work ... because a doctor's oath is to cause no harm.
Yet some medicines are harming and killing patients.
Even though that is not the intent in the prescription of them.
And the same medicines are saving so many.
It is a issue so complex, I could ponder it daily and still not quite get a grip on who is right and who is wrong.
It is a place I have trouble finding a middle ground.

I think we want to place blame somewhere when someone dies so quickly and unexpectedly. Some blame God, others pharmaceuticals, some blame themselves. And some have no one to blame. The medical procedure that may have caused death may at the time, have been unknown to do so.

I shared the short version of a story of someone I used to be friends and work with many years ago in one of my blogs.
"Beth" a pseudonym, was a writer and still is.
I was a professional writer back then and we spent many lunches wrapped around words, our careers and our mutual love of true crime books. She was only I knew who read true crime books as long as I did.

My affection for the subject began, I think, where I was born, in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Not too far from where Lizzie Borden lived, Fall River.
"Lizzie Borden took and axe and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41."
It was rhyme I skipped rope to.

As a little girl in New Bedford, I had a friend whose father bought Lizzie's Borden's milking stool. At least she said it was hers and so did her father, a wealthy man who lived at the end of our road. We would take turns sitting on that stool in the basement of her house, telling Lizzie stories and trying to freak each other out.

It was Lizzie's house I visited after I grew older and could comprehend it wasn't just a rhyme.
It was story I studied, a documentary I wrote in college.
And when I became an investigator, Lizzie was always with me.
Hers is a case in point -- that we never know, really know, what goes on behind closed doors.

Was there something between Lizzie and her parents, some kind of abuse that triggered her attack?
Did she just snap?
Or was she crazy all along?

I believe Lizzie was the killer. And Like O.J. in his criminal trial, she too was rich and a had good team of lawyers to win her innocence even though she was guilty.

I do not believe Lizzie's case had anything to to with medical malpractice. I don't think "medical malpractice" was even a concept way back then.

Nor was it in is our minds when my friend Beth and I discussed Lizzie's case and our shared affinity for true crime books over lunch and visits to each others house.
We were, as friends, glued to each other because of our commonalities -- the writing and the subject matter we were drawn to for reasons neither of us knew.

Time passed. I lost touch with my friend Beth. I called her and never got a call back. I tried for about a year and gave up.

I was transitioning myself to investigation when I got a phone call from a mutual friend, an artist, both Beth and I knew.

She said Beth asked her to tell me her father had died and she wouldn't be able to call me back. I was, at first, mortified such a good friend wouldn't tell me of her father's passing.
I couldn't let it rest and had to know what happened. And, as writers and investigators can do, I unlocked a door, so the words spilled out of our mutual friend's mouth.

"It was the strangest most horrifying thing," the mutual friend said as she unraveled the threads of the story for me.

Beth's brother was 32 years old. He lived alone, was always just a little "odd," but held a job and lived his life in a small home, close to his parents who he appeared to love very much. And the feeling was mutual.

Then one Sunday about 3 pm, he drove up to his parents' house in his pick-up.
His father was asleep on the sofa, napping.
He walked into the kitchen while his mother was cooking, ignored her hello, took the biggest of her knives and without a word... a hesitation... a beat.... walked into the living room and stabbed his sleeping father to death.
The first blow was straight to his heart.
The second his abdomen. The rest, all seventeen of them added insult to fatal injury as the mother watched her son kill his father while calling 911 from the kitchen.

Mother left the phone dangling off the hook, as she ran out the back door to the nearest neighbor's house.
The police, ambulance, then the coroner arrived.
When the police came, Beth's brother sat on the front porch of the house, on the the stoop, blood all over him and the killing knife laid next to the sofa where his father never woke up from his nap.
Beth's brother was catatonic... he would not speak or talk to anyone. He went from police car to jail and later on to a prison for the mentally insane.

In the time between arrest and conviction everyone tried to figure out why. Why he would commit patricide, kill the father he loved all his life? Just like that? They'd been fishing just the weekend before. What could make him turn?

His defense team figured it out.

He was a "Forceps Baby".
Today, if he was delivered the same way, one might have a case for medical malpractice.

But back then, no one knew that when he was born... and babies were stuck in the womb...
the forceps doctors used and placed on the frontal lobe of the babies' soft skulls while pulling them out of the birth canal caused brain damage. Brain damage that usually did not reveal itself until those babies became young men and women with a simmering brain injury that turned into a rolling boil.

Typically, when those forceps babies became adults in their late twenties, thirties they developed or exhibited a sort of latent schizophrenia that manifested itself in violence to themselves or others.

Beth's brothers defense team and the jury concurred... he was a forceps baby and that was what caused Beth's brother to snap, to kill the father he loved so much. To leave Beth an only child. To devastate her mother, who would never be the same. He was guilty by reason of insanity.

Beth's brother may still be locked away to this day or he may be out. I do not know.
Because after that happened, Beth sent me word that she never wanted to talk to to me again. Not because she was mad at me, or ashamed of me. But because I was her cohort in reading true crime books. And she felt if maybe she hadn't read those books maybe things would be different.

I recall the countless discussion we had about why we both were so fixated on true crime cases. "Maybe we're just sick" Beth laughed.
"Maybe we just want to understand the thinking of criminals and killers so we can protect ourselves and our families," was my theory.
"Maybe we read these books, " Beth once hypothesized, "because there will be some connection to our lives."

Didn't matter why. After her brother killed her father, Beth said she could never read another true crime book. And she could never hang out with me again because I reminded her of the stories she read and then lived through. Maybe her reading of the books, she had confessed to our mutual friend the artist, had brought this on her family.

The loss of Beth's father, brother, her family and our friendship was too complex for me to wrap myself around. I honored her request and never once saw or called her again. I do not know if she even knows I am an Investigator now.

It was indeed the forceps on the baby's frontal lobed that triggered the aberrant behavior. That method of forceps use in deliveries is no longer done.
So if a doctor delivered a baby that way today... and the same results occurred... it could be considered a case for malpractice. But back then, it was standard practice.

I think the point of this post is this.

Live every day without taking it for granted. Love with your full heart. You never know when someone you love will exit the planet.

Placing blame is an after thought, it does nothing to bring a person back. It does however, help to answer the most important question asked after a life altering injury or death.
"Why?"

I know now why Beth's brother killed her father. I still don't know why Lizzie killed her dad.
And I only think I know why my beloved investigator friend died so suddenly. Because he took the pills... and every pill had side effects... and we all hope we won't be the ones that get the worst.

Medical malpractice investigations are not only hard and expensive for the attorneys to take on, they are are also hard and expensive to win.
They are incredibly complex and often the process of the investigation reveals other factors that raise questions about whether the victim contributed in some way to the downfall -- taking other medications, smoking, drinking, or having an underlying medical condition no one knew about until the injury or autopsy.

Nothing can change the fact that someone you love is dead.
What helps to soften the blow is to understand why.
And for those reasons, many people turn to investigators and personal injury attorneys, for answers.
The answers never solve the problem, they just break the questions down into a equation more fathomable to those grieving.
And then everyone does what they must.
Move on...
with one foot in the future and another stuck in the past.