Month: July 2019

He Remembered Hundreds; I Forgot One

Welcome, Donna and Pat

My wife, Donna, and I went on our first cruise, to the Caribbean, on MS Maasdam, a Holland America ship rated to carry 1,258 passengers.

MS Maasdam
MS Maasdam

On the first night, when we went to the La Fontaine dining room to have supper, we were warmly greeted at the entrance by a member of the crew who told us his name and asked us our names.

The next night when we went to dinner – and every night for the rest of the week-long cruise — he greeted us and hundreds of other passengers, by name.

What was his name?

I don’t know. He told me his name but  it went in one ear and out the other.

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Do Not Leave Your Luggage Unattended

When we went on a cruise to Alaska, leaving from and returning to Vancouver,   British Columbia, Canada, we encountered a problem.

The round trip plane tickets to Vancouver from Raleigh were expensive and, for about the same money, we could take the scenic route, literally. We could buy round-trip plane tickets to Seattle, spend the night there, take a train up the coast to Vancouver and spend the night there before boarding the ship. So that’s what we did.

On this nine-day holiday we took five suitcases, the heaviest of which weighed almost 50 pounds.

Why?

Truth be told, five suitcases was mostly my wife’s doing.  Donna knew some days would be hot and some days would be cold and she planned on dressing comfortably either way.

Herding five suitcases through a busy, big city airport you’ve never laid eyes on before is not all that easy.  So after we claimed our luggage we piled it up in the middle of an enormous concourse and Donna stood guard while I went looking for ground transportation. A few minutes later we were  in a cab headed for our hotel.  I did not discover my problem until we arrived, got out, and collected our  four suitcases.

No, wait!  Didn’t we have five suitcases?

Oh, yes, we did.  But not now, now we had four.  I had left one suitcase at the airport.  I asked the cab driver to wait while I carried the four bags inside and then I asked him to take me back to the airport — and step on it, please.

When I arrived I rushed back to the last place I remembered seeing the missing suitcase.  And there it was, right where I had left it an hour or so earlier, sitting unattended in the middle of that busy concourse.

Coming Friday: Unforgettable Quotes

 

 

 

 

 

 

Misadventures

I was looking for something else in a database of cases handled by the N. C. Office of the Chief Medical Examiner when I stumbled across a surprising word, in all caps, “MISADVENTURE.”

I was an investigative reporter at The News & Observer in Raleigh and I was intrigued.  Was this what I suspected?  Were these people who had been accidentally killed while undergoing medical treatment?

Well, yes, that’s pretty much it.

A medical misadventure is an unlucky event, for everyone involved, an event in which a patient is injured or killed.  All the patients named in that database, of course, were dead.

Some misadventures are due to negligence, some are due to accidents, pure and simple — a doctor punctured something he shouldn’t have punctured and the patient bleeds out on the table or a nurse administers the wrong medicine with fatal results.  Every medical misadventure should be carefully investigated by licensing officials, but that wasn’t happening. 

The International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems [ICD] devotes page after page to all the things that can go wrong, to “misadventures,”  a word I had never heard used in that context.   No surprise there — there’s a warehouse full of things I’ve never heard of.

But this will surprise you:

Members of the N.C. Medical Board, good doctors who were responsible for weeding out bad doctors, said they didn’t know know about misadventures either. The chairman of the medical board’s investigative committee told me that as “incredible” as it might sound, members of his committee had never heard the term “misadventure.”

I didn’t think think is was “incredible” that none of them had heard about medical misadventures, I thought it was unbelievable.

Postscript: A few days later the N.C. Medical Board voted to gather information about “misadventures” from the Chief Medical Examiner office.

“Investigative analysis of these cases will be promptly carried out, and appropriate action or actions will be taken by the N.C. Medical Board,” the board’s statement said.

Coming Monday: He Remembered Hundreds; I Forgot One