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These tragic stories happen much too regularly.

The parent forgets the child in the car while going to work. Did the same parent ever forget to go to work. Of course not. It shows our priorities.

People forget to go to work all the time. They think it is Saturday, when it is Friday. Or they screw up because of a holiday midweek.

The bottom line is that people make mistakes about work, children, and life. Sometimes the mistake is forgetting your coffee on the roof of your car, sometimes it is leaving the gas pump in your car while you drive off, sometimes it is leaving a surgical sponge in a patient, sometimes it is amputating the wrong leg of a patient.

The saddest thing about this event is that the poor Mom will never forgive herself. She's much more likely to become an alcoholic, drug addict, or to kill herself one night, which compounds the loss.

jas3

Well put.

I know of cases in the medical field where a physician missed a diagnosis. Simple things...too distracted...was up late working an emergency case, personal problems, whatever. But when they sat down to work, all that stuff came together, they missed something because they are human beings (by our nature,imperfect) and a patient suffered or died.

The physician is often painted as an incompetent, uncaring, uneducated, scheming, bungling, indifferent, arrogant, self-centered, poor excuse for a physician. Sometimes this illustration is done by the lawyers, sometimes by an angry patient, and sometimes even by the media.

But most of the time the physician is just an average person, a decent person trying to get through life and do the right things on the way.

And they are tripped up by having the phone ring at the wrong time as they began to look at an xray, or a nurse with a question about another patient in the ICU as they prepared to stitch up after an operation.

And you know, there are plenty of people in life we can be judgemental about, who are deserving of it. I just don’t think this is one of them.