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BOOK'S INTRODUCTION |
At 7:18 in the morning, three young doctors entered my ten-year-old daughter’s hospital room on routine morning rounds. Lisa had been admitted just a few hours earlier after being brought to the Emergency Department to obtain some pain relief. She had broken her leg in a schoolyard accident several months earlier, and although the break had healed, it had left her with nerve damage that flared up periodically and caused unbearable agony. There was nothing life threatening or remotely dangerous about it; she only needed some medical help to make her pain go away.
As one of the doctors bent over towards her, he yelled, “Call a code!” Doctors, nurses, and technicians immediately rushed in, filling the tiny room beyond capacity. The nurses gently tried to lead me out. “No, no, I want to stay,” I insisted. “I need to be here when she wakes up. She’ll be frightened when she sees all these people!” The doctors performed CPR, frantically pushing up and down on Lisa’s chest. They hooked her up to a large machine, attached defibrillator paddles, yelled “clear”, and jolted her with electricity. “Again”. “Clear”. Jolt. “Again”. “Clear”. Jolt.
On TV, the doctors always manage to resuscitate their patient, who suddenly coughs and flutters her eyelids. We viewers become teary-eyed with relief, knowing that everything will be okay. But this time there was to be no “happily ever after”. At 7:52 on the morning of October 22, 1998, at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, beautiful, vibrant ten-year-old Lisa was officially pronounced dead.
Why did a healthy child in a major North American city, who went to a reputedly world-class children’s hospital just for some pain relief, die within hours of being admitted? No one knew the answer. And for a long time, no one except us, Lisa’s family, wanted to bother looking for one.
A year and a half after her death, to the stunned surprise of virtually everyone, a coroner’s inquest jury found that Lisa’s death was a homicide. Another year and a half after the jury’s momentous finding, the police charged the two nurses who were responsible for her care on the night she died with criminal negligence causing death.
It took almost two more years for court proceedings to begin, only to end abruptly as doctors and nurses changed their testimony, became less-than-forthcoming in the witness box, or refused to testify altogether.
When we claimed the hospital was responsible for her death, everyone thought we were so grief-stricken and overwrought that we were blindly grasping to find someone to blame. No one believed our allegations that health care professionals–nurses who take care of sick children!–had turned their backs on a dying child because they didn’t think there was anything physically wrong with her, because they believed her problem was mental and not physical and therefore she wasn’t entitled to the same level of care as their “real” patients.
Our allegations that Lisa’s nurses were directly responsible for her death were ultimately borne out by the coroner’s inquest, the findings of two nursing experts, and the professional misconduct charges laid by the College of Nurses of Ontario. Despite this, the Hospital for Sick Children never stopped trying to conceal the truth. When its efforts were unsuccessful, the hospital, its lawyers, and the nursing community marshalled their collective resources in an attempt to portray me as a demon bent on vengeance, who was single-handedly responsible for destroying the careers of two innocent and conscientious nurses.
While no hospital wants to trumpet its failures, how could the senior administration of this renowned children’s hospital and research centre, the famous Hospital for Sick Children, go so far as to mislead and deceive the coroner’s office, the justice system, and the family of a child who died a result of its employees’ negligence? The hospital quietly paid us a small settlement and thereby avoided a medical malpractice lawsuit, so it didn’t have to worry about any legal liability. Why would it subsequently go to extraordinary and very costly lengths to deny the truth and protect staff whose misconduct was so egregious that every doctor and nurse who learned the details and was not affiliated with the hospital or its nurses unanimously condemned it?
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