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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

My Father’s Finest Hour

Donna and I had only been married about six weeks and we had no phone, so the message was delivered on foot that evening by her little brother, Eddie: My Dad’s plant had burned.

Truth be told, in the summer of 1963 Dad didn’t have much of a business left. Or life, for that matter.

His “plant” was in a rented building on Smith Street in Charlotte where his employees assembled wardrobe boxes and manufactured and packaged pot holder looms and loops, and Tiger Teeth, a wire with sharp ends, used to hold insulation in place.   Now that was all gone.  There was no insurance to collect and, except for a few steel rods, nothing to salvage.

John F. Stith Sr.
John F. Stith Sr.

John F. Stith Sr. was in a tough spot:

He was old.  At least by the standards of that day. He had turned 68 in May.

He was sick. He had emphysema so bad I thought he might die 18 months earlier when I was overseas, in the Navy, and I wouldn’t get to go to his funeral. 

He was broke.  He had borrowed money to give us a wedding present, I learned later.  He and Mother still lived in a two-bedroom house on Leigh Avenue in North Charlotte, then a working class section of town, the house he bought after he had lost everything he owned in Alabama and moved his family to North Carolina ten years earlier.

 I knew there wasn’t much I could do other than show up but I took off work the next day anyway.   I was a rising sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill but Donna and I were living and working in Charlotte that summer.  She was a stenographer for the FBI; I was a reporter for The Charlotte News.

I needed to be there for him but I also needed to be there for myself, just in case.

Until I turned 18 and went to boot camp, and then to sea, my father had dominated my life.  He had been the undisputed Lord and Master of his house and seven children. When he told you to do something, you had better listen up: he only told you once.

Now he was old, sick, broke, and burned out. I didn’t want him to sit down on the curb and cry, but if he did, if he came unglued, I wanted to see it.  It would have been like watching a mountain slide into the sea.

But he did not sit down and cry. On the contrary. That may have been the finest hour of his life.  He strutted around, barking orders, acting like the fire was gift that allowed him to demonstrate his manliness. He looked happy: Finally! A problem worthy of me.

He told me he would be back in business the next day and he was. He rented a warehouse in North Charlotte that was infested with rats the size of small cats, that flooded every time it rained hard and the creek rose, but he was back in business.

After the fire Dad reinvented himself and made a ton of money, enough to buy a new house in a good neighborhood, enough to enable my Mother to go back to Alabama after his death and retire in comfort.   

My father became a rag man, buying tons of remnants from textile mills and reselling them. He bought cloth for 10 cents a pound and sold it, some of it, for $2 a pound. You can get well that way, selling stuff for up to 20 times what you paid for it.

Coming Friday: Misadventures