Within months of completing my training, I received the call that every doctor dreads.
"You've been named in a malpractice lawsuit," said the hospital administrator on the other end of the line.
The family of a patient I had seen briefly a year before believed that a colleague's decision not to operate hastened her demise. Now their lawyers, combing through the medical records, believed that a single sentence in my note brought that doctor's decision into question. As a second or maybe even third opinion, I had written that the woman was a "possible candidate" for surgery.
The truth was that when I saw her she was a possible candidate, but only tenuously so. In fact, her health deteriorated so rapidly that by the time she finished seeing all the specialists and returned to her original surgeon, the chances of her surviving any treatment, no matter how heroic, were almost nil.
Though I knew all that, in the weeks after that telephone call I couldn't help questioning myself, going over the case in my mind as soon as I woke up, then again and again late into the night. I froze with fear every time I was asked for my opinion on a diagnosis or treatment plan and became a master at evasion, littering my assessments and write-ups with words like "maybe," "perhaps" and "will await further work-up." And I wondered if my colleagues knew, if the blot on my record had already soaked through the fabric of my professional reputation.
In the end, the family dropped the case; I never met with any lawyers or went to court. But memories of the all-encompassing threat of a claim came flooding back when I read a recent study of how litigation affects doctors.
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