Posted on 02/21/2003 11:34:34 PM PST by kattracks
DURHAM, N.C., Feb 22, 2003 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- Two decades ago, Mack Mahoney lost his 2-month-old son, Anthony, after an operation to correct a kidney defect. He felt the operation was botched, but didn't see the sense in taking any action.
This time around, Mahoney refuses to stay silent.
The Louisburg home builder led a three-year campaign to raise money for Jesica Santillan to get a heart-lung transplant. Now he is leading a public relations assault against Duke University Medical Center, which has admitted that the organs doctors implanted into the 17-year-old Mexican girl were of the wrong blood type.
"I speak out for Jesica because I love Jesica like my own child," Mahoney said in a raspy Texas accent. "Babies and children, they're at our mercy. I mean, if we don't take care of them, they can't take care of theirselves."
During the past two weeks, the bearded, 55-year-old with a white Panama hat has become a thorn in Duke's side and the public face of an immigrant family's grief. In many ways, Mahoney is the most unlikely of public champions.
His involvement with Jesica started with what was supposed to have been an anonymous donation to help pay her medical bills. But when the family insisted on meeting him, Mahoney became the point man in the effort to raise money for Jesica's care.
Now, a man who nearly lost his voice to a false diagnosis of throat cancer has become the mouthpiece for a family struggling to communicate in a foreign tongue.
"Nobody else can fight for her," said Mahoney, who was left with a gravely whisper after losing half his larynx. "Her family does not speak English. They can bully them around and do all they want to, and I just refuse to let them bully me. That's the difference.
"I don't bully. And they can't intimidate me, because I don't intimidate."
Mahoney's outspokenness - and plainspokenness - has caught one of the nation's most respected hospitals off its guard.
Mahoney managed Elizabeth Dole's Senate campaign in Franklin County last year, and he reached out to her for help with Jesica's case.
"They gutted her like a fish," he told Dole tearfully.
While Mahoney was having a contentious meeting with the Duke brass, Dole called him on his cell phone and asked to speak to the hospital's top administrator.
Until then, he said, Duke was trying to find ways to get around his medical power of attorney and had threatened to kick him out of the hospital.
"He is a tough guy," says Renee McCormick, a land developer who is helping Mahoney. "This is not a guy who cries. ... Mack has lived this ordeal with her for three years."
Jesica's mother, Magdalena, has said that without Mahoney to raise a fuss, Duke would have let Jesica quietly die. McCormick agrees.
"I think she would have died from rejection, and no one would have known why," she says.
Duke Medical Center chief executive Dr. William Fulkerson said Friday that the hospital told the family of the mistake immediately and accepted responsibility for making it right.
Jesica's Hope Chest, the charity Mahoney founded, has helped eight other children besides its namesake. One, an 11-year-old Franklin County girl, had a successful heart-lung transplant two years ago at the University of North Carolina's hospital.
"She's bouncing off the walls," Mahoney says of that girl whose story turned out so differently from Jesica's.
But there is a special bond with the Santillans.
Mahoney learned Spanish growing up near Dallas and running a business in Mexico. He spends his days in the pediatric intensive care unit, translating for the Santillans and comforting them.
He was in the waiting room Friday when Jesica was wheeled into the hall for tests to determine whether she had suffered irreversible brain damage. On the table next to him was a children's board book about a little bulldozer.
It could have been about him.
"People use me to lift or clear things out of the way," the brightly colored book read. "I can ride right through a solid brick wall. What am I? I'm a bulldozer."
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Allen G. Breed is the AP's Southeast regional writer, based in Raleigh.
By ALLEN G. BREED Associated Press Writer
Imperfect outcome due to imperfect world.
I assure you that her plight is all over the Mexican/Hispanic media. Word is out, come to the USA for free treatment for your medical problems
I hope Elizabeth Dole goes to bat for US citizens, as well.
90% of newspaper articles omit the illegal status of immigrants in the news. Another game is to call illegal aliens, *migrants* or *undocumented immigrants*. Plus the female reporters are usually sent in to make it a sob story.
So you advocate breaking laws to "save the children"?
Correction, they COULDN'T cover it up. If it had been possible, you can bet they would have tried.
The physician who made this preposterous mistake should NOT be allowed to practice medicine on the general public again (I recommend that he be relegated to fixing ingrown toenails on prison inmates).
Is this known fact or rumor?
The family has been here for 3 years so if they don't speak English it's something they've chosen not to do. An adult can learn a new language within 6 months enough to communicate and get by in. Children can learn faster.
I have a feeling he's kept his grief bottle up, he's going to exploit this case and he's the puppeteer manipulating the family. He's going to go for huge money, it's his way of getting revenge with the system.
Yes. I would also have helped slaves escape from slavery in the 1860's and I would have sheltered Jews in Germany. If you wouldn't rob a bank to save your child's like, you are a pathetic excuse for a parent.
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