but what fancy name do they use when you DO know twice as much about the subject as the arse standing at a podium bullshitting you into accepting something that will make him a multimillionaire ?
If you have a medical qualification, just say so.
i wasn't referring to myself in this case.
At risk of diverting the thread even more… a few facts about a scandal at bristol royal infirmary. In 1987 we took sarah on holiday to Tenerife and noticed to our horror she started to go blue as our trip up Teide got to the cable car. She had no distress and had no problems in the lower caldera. Back in the UK we found she had a heart defect, a ventricular septal anomaly, the hole between the chambers vital to the foetus in utero, which usually seals hours after birth, had a pinhole leak.
A swift trip to the cardiology unit at Bristol ensued where we were told the problem was inoperable with the current level of technology and our best hope was to take her home and hope she would survive long enough to reach a few birthdays by which time she would be old enough and strong enough to survive the operation
The nurses took her Polaroid photo with us and put it on the picture wall. There wasn't a dry eye in the room when we left. No father in the room could look me in the eye because they knew - Moira broke down on being told - that we were being sent home probably to watch her die, whereas everyone else had been promised hope.
I am still a holder of a licence to experiment on living animals. I was an accomplished operator of various microsurgical processes i used to harvest tissue from donor animals for my research. By law none were allowed to survive, all had to be euthanised even if the procedure was non lethal.
But my point is i knew. Or at least i suspected
I did not know Sarah had inherited my genetic quirk that lets her blood carry oxygen as a Sherpa. But thanks to that she lived. The defect is still there but barely noticeable.
But every one of the children in that room that day is dead. Killed by outrageously incompetent surgeons attempting the utterly impossible. No one stopped them because all were in awe-struck fear of their godlike powers. No one spoke out because all knew their NHS career would be at an end
Eventually an anaesthetist did blow the whistle.
The surgeons were struck off.
But not before the name of the whistleblower was leaked.
He had to leave the UK and take up practice in Australia because no surgeon in the NHS was prepared to have them on their operating theatre staff.
I read of this so called measure of overconfidence in the unqualified and i smell the stench of corruption that pervaded Bristol Royal Infirmary in the late 80s, more pungent than the stench of death left in the operating theatres in which the ‘qualified’ practiced their ineptness with fatal consequences for everyone they opened up
Decades before JK Rowling made millions from the phrase ‘the boy who lived’ i used the same phrase fir Sarah. The girl who lived because the incompetent failed to recognise the ease if the procedure that would gave sealed the hole.
After the striking off i had a chat with a few of my former colleagues and they had words with others in the Profession. Addenbrokes was the site of the first successful procedure these charlatans shied away from. Not that Sarah needed it then or now. But no one will have to go through what Moira did, and no one will have to do what all those fathers who could not look me in the eye then had to do within the next year …. It’s a very small white box, and such a very deep hole.
