Safety is no Accident

I’m kind of past the point where I feel able to write down how I feel about everything that is happening. On the one hand I think that actually I/we are doing OK. On the other we live in such a displaced reality that the word “OK” cannot calibrated to normal living. I mean, how can things be “OK” when for the last week doctors have been pumping Kay’s body full of toxic chemicals to kill her bone marrow?

But this sense of “OK-ness” persists for some perverse reason. I’m left wondering if we’ll ever return to normality when “OK” means to us what “OK” means to you. Or will we end up living the rest of our lives in the shadow of leukemia? That’s really what worries me: whether there will ever be an end to this episode. I’m afraid not. I think that when we’re through the bone marrow transplant phase, Marion and & I spend a very long time worrying – at least seven years to say the least. And you know what? I really don’t want to spend my life like that, not that I have much choice of course.

So how can one possibly return to a world where “OK” means to me what “OK” means to you?

Back to slightly less philosophical matters, I probably don’t need to say it, but I’m staggered that the medics here have made yet another blunder with Kay’s treatment. I’ve now had 24 hours and 93km on my bike to think about it and I still cannot get my head around the idea. In the worst case we could have brought a child to this hospital with leukemia and taken anyway a child with brain, kidney and bladder damage. Not to mention the expected permanent side effects of the treatment. And you know what makes me really mad? I can live with problems that arise from a doctor having to make a judgement call and getting it wrong. Ditto with failures of medical technology. But the fact that the things that have happened to us have been avoidable failures of the system makes me incandescent. Whatever happened to the Hippocratic Oath’s “do no harm”?

And the other problem with these failings is that they are faceless. No individual directly screwed up. The problems arose in the gaps between people, in the places where a system is supposed to exist to ensure consistency and continuity.

The UK Civil Aviation Authority’s motto is “Safety is no Accident”. The Hippocratic Oath’s “do no harm” can be equated to (at least) a doctor’s duty to ensure that safety of their patient at all times. And that is not happening here. Time after time Kay is being exposed to toxic chemicals without adequate safety precautions. If this was an aviation organization, it would have been shutdown years ago. I’m truly astonished that these people are allowed to go on practicing medicine in this way. Someone should have blown the whistle on them ages ago.