Life Lessons & Lawyers

I spent this morning talking with Lawyer #3, the first two having turned down the "privilege" of representing me in a legal action against my former radiologist, my former gynecologist, or both.
While I'm quite thankful that I'm not dying in the near future or dead due to their negligence, it also means that any lawsuit I might bring isn't worth enough for it to be a moneymaker for a lawyer working on contingency to pursue.

This barrister was a little different though. Once he carefully familiarized himself with the complicated timeline and details, he started to get angry enough to at least consider what could be done to hold these people accountable for neglecting to inform me about my probable cancer, 14 months before I was actually diagnosed. He asked for a month to ponder my options. That's something, at least.

While my fraught-with-human-error story is way too complex to go into here, the lessons I've learned from the process are noteworthy enough to share:

Always, always, always get a copy of the results of every medical test you undergo, as soon as the results are available. Read your report, ask your doctor questions about it, and file it where you can find it again. Don't wait for someone to call you and tell you that there is something wrong. Never assume that no news is good news.

Keep copies of films like mammograms--sometimes they can be put on a disc--and your test results, and haul them around with you to share with any new doctors you see.

Once a year, find out what doctors are writing in your medical records about you. Request a complete copy of your file under HIPPA regulations. Read it and correct it, just like you would with your credit report.

If I had known then what I know now, I could have caught this cancer more than a year before my doctors got around to telling me about it. The thought that haunts me is, "what if I hadn't gone back a year later for another mammogram? What if I had skipped a year or two?" I had always considered myself to be an intelligent and informed patient, but I was passive when it came to getting the results and reading them for myself. I trusted my medical caregivers to tell me if something was wrong, and they dropped the ball at a critical moment.

My only recourse at this point may be to make sure everyone I know understands the mistakes I made, and hopefully prevent this sort of recordkeeping snafu from happening to someone else.