Who to blame
At the fundraiser, a person asked me if it would be easier of harder for me if someone had made a mistake (i.e. a medical mistake) with our case. How much would it help to have someone to blame?
As far as I understand, no one made a mistake that changed the outcome of our case. There were some things that I would consider mistakes, but the time frame for doing something about the clot that causes a stroke is 3 hours and nothing else is really significant. Consider, the scenario:
Linda has a history of migraines, often preceded by stroke-like symptoms. So you wait 30min to see if they clear up. You call an ambulance. It takes time to arrive, time to stablize her, time to the hospital, etc. So another 1 hour. You get evaluated by a physician who orders a CAT scan (to check for bleeding), which has to be read. Another hour. Any glitches along the way and you are already out of the window where you could do any good, and even inside the window there is no guarantee that a treatment would be effective.
For me, it is better that there is no scapegoat. I can get mad for days over $9.50 that AT&T tried to defraud me out of on a telephone bill. I'll burn up the time of their customer service department in retribution and refuse to pay them anyway. All because I am angry that they have wronged me.
If I could be livid over something like that, think how I would feel about the person responsible for injuring my wife, my best friend. That would consume me. I can't even imagine it.
I know people ask questions about why God lets bad things happen to people, and something like our situation causes questions of faith in some. I'm not one of those people. We had very bad luck. Some of the decisions we made may have contributed to our bad luck, but we tried to make the best decisions with the information we had. There was no reason to think that Linda, 35 years old and healthy, would have this happen to her. Even if we searched now, there's no reason to think that we would find a cause. People sometimes have freak unusual events, and I think we are those people.
Why it happens, I don't know. I think it's just part of how the universe is made. I'm one of those people who likes to feel like they have free will. Free will to me means the will to do good or evil---if you can't choose to do evil then you aren't free. But if the universe is designed so that people can be free to do evil, it means bad stuff can happen, because people might do evil things to you.
It's not really related, but I used to think nothing dramatic would ever happen to me. There are generations and generations of ordinary people who have never been remembered, and I had pretty much accepted that I was going to have an uneventful life. We almost all do. I don't play the lottery. Of course, I've done the math and I know better. But more than that, I just thought it wasn't meant for me. Too dramatic.
I probably won't play the lottery in the future either, but now only because I still think it's a bad bet.
At the fundraiser, a person asked me if it would be easier of harder for me if someone had made a mistake (i.e. a medical mistake) with our case. How much would it help to have someone to blame?
As far as I understand, no one made a mistake that changed the outcome of our case. There were some things that I would consider mistakes, but the time frame for doing something about the clot that causes a stroke is 3 hours and nothing else is really significant. Consider, the scenario:
Linda has a history of migraines, often preceded by stroke-like symptoms. So you wait 30min to see if they clear up. You call an ambulance. It takes time to arrive, time to stablize her, time to the hospital, etc. So another 1 hour. You get evaluated by a physician who orders a CAT scan (to check for bleeding), which has to be read. Another hour. Any glitches along the way and you are already out of the window where you could do any good, and even inside the window there is no guarantee that a treatment would be effective.
For me, it is better that there is no scapegoat. I can get mad for days over $9.50 that AT&T tried to defraud me out of on a telephone bill. I'll burn up the time of their customer service department in retribution and refuse to pay them anyway. All because I am angry that they have wronged me.
If I could be livid over something like that, think how I would feel about the person responsible for injuring my wife, my best friend. That would consume me. I can't even imagine it.
I know people ask questions about why God lets bad things happen to people, and something like our situation causes questions of faith in some. I'm not one of those people. We had very bad luck. Some of the decisions we made may have contributed to our bad luck, but we tried to make the best decisions with the information we had. There was no reason to think that Linda, 35 years old and healthy, would have this happen to her. Even if we searched now, there's no reason to think that we would find a cause. People sometimes have freak unusual events, and I think we are those people.
Why it happens, I don't know. I think it's just part of how the universe is made. I'm one of those people who likes to feel like they have free will. Free will to me means the will to do good or evil---if you can't choose to do evil then you aren't free. But if the universe is designed so that people can be free to do evil, it means bad stuff can happen, because people might do evil things to you.
It's not really related, but I used to think nothing dramatic would ever happen to me. There are generations and generations of ordinary people who have never been remembered, and I had pretty much accepted that I was going to have an uneventful life. We almost all do. I don't play the lottery. Of course, I've done the math and I know better. But more than that, I just thought it wasn't meant for me. Too dramatic.
I probably won't play the lottery in the future either, but now only because I still think it's a bad bet.
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