Richard Mabry: Medical Error

She was sitting behind the wheel, trying to restart the car, when there was a tap on the driver's side window. The middleaged Hispanic man standing there looked pleasant enough. The name over the pocket of his blue work shirt was Ramon. Anna looked beyond him and saw a faded blue pickup parked across the street, a woman in the passenger seat.

"Can I help?" the man said in a voice with only a hint of accent.

Anna measured her options and decided that Ramon was her best one. "Yes, please. It just quit."

After about ten minutes, Ramon peered at Anna from beneath the open hood of her car and said, "I believe it is probably the fuel pump." His brown eyes mirrored the sorrow that was in his voice.

"Can you fix it?"

Ramon shook his head. "No, I am sorry. My wife and I can give you a ride somewhere if that would help."

Anna recalled the Toyota dealership she passed every day on her way to the medical center. She'd never paid any attention to it until now. "Thanks, but I have a cell phone. I can call for a tow."

Forty minutes later, Anna sat in the waiting room of the dealership, turning the pages of a year-old copy of a magazine without any recognition of the words and pictures. The car had served her faithfully through medical school and residency, as well as two owners before her, owners who had probably not been particularly kind to the vehicle. If this episode wasn't the final chapter for the car, that couldn't be far away. Should she look at another car while she was here?

"May I help you while you're waiting?" It was as though the salesman had read her thoughts.

"I'm waiting for my car to be repaired."

"Why don't I show you some of the bargains we have? You might decide to trade up."

"No, thank you."

"If you change your mind, let me know."

The salesman had no sooner left than Anna heard, "Dr. McIntyre?"

She turned in her chair to find the service advisor standing behind her. "Your car needs a new fuel pump. And we've found a couple of other things." He held out a clipboard. "Here's what it will take to repair it. If you want us to do it, we can get right on it and have you out of here in two or three hours."

Anna looked at the figures. She could afford the repairs- just barely. But maybe she'd be better offputting the money into a new car.

"Let me think about it." She looked around for the salesman, and found him at the coffee machine.

The salesman led Anna on a whirlwind tour of the lot, and after half an hour she sat in his office while his fingers flew over the keys of his computer. "Well, Doctor, I believe we can put you in that car at a price you can afford. Let me get a little information, and I'll run a credit report."

Ten minutes later, the salesman swiveled away from the computer screen, and the look in his eyes told Anna everything she needed to know. "I've done a credit check. I think we might have some trouble financing that car. We can probably do it, but I can't get the interest rate I wanted. And that would make the payments-."

"No, I understand." Anna wanted to argue, but realized how futile it would be. The red flags were already up. Her credit had become suspect. And even though the credit reporting companies had promised to put things right, it wasn't going to happen today.

She found the service advisor and said, "Okay, just do the repair. I'll wait."

"Thanks anyway." Nick Valentine hung up the phone and rummaged through the books and journals scattered in front of him. The desk of his academic office, never the most organized eighteen square feet in the Pathology Department, looked like a war zone. He was computer-literate and often did online searches for information, but at times it was comforting to feel the heft of a textbook in your hands, to mark an important passage with a yellow highlighter. For this problem, he'd pulled out all the stops: a computer search, back issues of journals from the department library, textbooks-old and new- taken from his shelves. And now he'd just hung up from a short, albeit rather unsatisfactory, conversation with the head of the Allergy Division. His head swam with information overload.

He let his gaze rest on Eric Hatley's chart and the notes he'd made when he reviewed it again. Nothing he'd found changed his mind about the cause of Hatley's death. However, there was one bit of information that puzzled him. Maybe he'd go downstairs and get some coffee to help him think.

"Got a minute?"

The voice brought him instantly alert. Anna McIntyre stood in the doorway. Her shoulders sagged just a bit, even though she had a faint smile plastered on her face. Nick wondered if something more had gone wrong. Then he noticed the two paper cups in Anna's hands.

"I come bearing gifts from Starbucks," she said, advancing and placing one of the containers on his desk like a priest laying a sacrifice on the altar. "I wanted to thank you for the dinner last evening, and for the work you're putting in on the Hatley case."

Nick flipped the lid offthe cup and tossed it into his wastebasket, barely hitting his target. He nodded his appreciation and took a deep sip. "No thanks necessary, but you don't know how much I needed this pick-me-up. I've been working all afternoon trying to find a blood test for allergy to Omnilex. Unfortunately, there isn't one, at least not one that's reliable. Mainly because the drug's too new."

Anna eased into the chair across the desk from Nick and took a taste of her coffee. "So there's no way to know for sure whether Eric Hatley had his anaphylactic reaction because of the antibiotic we gave him."

Nick recognized this as a statement, not a question. "His tryptase level came back this morning-sky-high. Hatley defi- nitely had a severe anaphylactic reaction. I just finished the microscopic exam on the tissue samples from the autopsy. Nothing else showed up. Bottom line, there's no question that a massive allergic reaction was the final event. But we can't prove the cause."

"Could this be due to the anesthesiologist giving him a wrong medication of some kind?"

"What makes you ask?"

"The staffman was out of the room. JeffMurray is a first- year resident, not experienced, not necessarily good under stress. At the time I didn't make too much of it, but as I thought about it later, I wondered if maybe he didn't give Hatley something other than the antibiotic Luc ordered."

Nick shook his head. "No way. I went so far as to go up to surgery this morning and look through one of the anesthesia carts. Other than various antibiotics, I couldn't find anything there that could have done this."

"So I can't blame anesthesia for this."

"Afraid not. But this should interest you." Nick reached past the pile of articles and books on his desk, moved aside Hatley's hospital chart, and picked up a thin file held together by a metal fastener strip threaded through two holes punched at the top.

"What's that?"

"I had them pull the emergency room record for Eric Hatley, the visit that was the basis for your choice of antibiotics. Have a look."

He held out the folder and watched Anna thumb through it the way physicians learn to do, scanning the pages and picking out the important nuggets of information. He could tell when she got to the part that had stopped him cold.

"What do you think?" he asked.

"I think this patient signed in with the same name, address, and date of birth as the man who died on the operating table."

"But?"

"Our Eric Hatley was a middle-aged Caucasian male."Anna looked down at the page where her finger marked the line that Nick knew would get her attention, as it had his. "It says, 'The patient is a young, African-American male who complains of-' "

"Right. Same identifying data. Different people." Nick drained his coffee cup. "Looks like you're not the only person who's had their identity stolen. But in this case, Eric Hatley lost more than his credit cards. He lost his life."