Taking a Stand Part 2 – Janet Discovers Missing X-Rays & Medical Records

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July 27, 2010 by Rest Ministries  
Filed under Advocacy, Articles, Books, Person w/ Illness, Share Your Story, What's New?

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Yesterday we heard from Janet Lynn Mitchell as she discovered her surgeons had lied to her for 15 years about a medical error they had made which had then caused multiple surgeries.Today she shares about taking the next step–digging deeper to find out just what did happen during her first surgery and the years following.

Janet Discovers Missing X-Rays & Medical Records

In a fog, I drove home. I couldn’t wait to fall into my husband Marty’s arms and cry. I had met him the night of my tenth surgery. For months he had sat by my hospital bed. He’d been my cheerleader as I learned to walk again.

After talking to Marty, I wrote Dr. Ulild a letter. I repeated back to him, word-for-word, what I had heard at my appointment thus giving him the opportunity to correct anything I had misunderstood. I composed my letter and concluded with thanking him for his honesty.

I struggled to accept the idea that my teen and college years had been so difficult due to another’s mistake. I’d grown up believing God had a special plan for my life. No detail or circumstance was too insignificant for His attention.

As I tried to sort out my hurt and anger, I was reminded of Genesis 50:20 where Joseph so confidently stated, “…you meant evil against me but God meant it for good….” I wanted to have a heart as gracious as Joseph’s. I wondered if Joseph had experienced such a range of emotions along his route to believing. God, please bless this mess! I prayed.

A month later Marty returned with me to Dr. Ulild’s office to hear “the news” for himself. There, the doctor launched into his explanations of the medical options I now faced. It soon became obvious that I had told, that Dr. Ulild’s confession was no longer a secret. Hesitantly, he began to explain to Marty about the surgical mistakes that had been made.

“Dr Ulild, will you draw us a picture? I’m not sure I understand,” I said. Clearly agitated, Dr. Ulild drew a picture of two knees on the paper that covered the examining table. He sketched one knee demonstrating what should have occurred in my surgery and the other showing the mistakes that had been made.

“Janet, I’ve told you these things so that you can resolve them in your mind as to what happened,” Dr. Ulild said as he got up to leave. Once he was gone, Marty and I quietly removed Dr. Ulild’s artwork and took it with us.

The following week my friend, Jane, went with me to pick up my X-rays that Dr. Ulild had kept the day he confessed.

“You can’t have them,” the nurse informed us. “I’ve been told to guard your X-rays with my life!”

“The X-rays are mine and I need them.”

“Janet, they’re not here.”

“They have to be,” I insisted.

The nurse then laid my medical file on one of the benches and went to look again. I glanced at Jane, and she nodded. I grabbed my medical file as Jane passed me her jacket to cover it. Without X-rays, but with my “hot” medical file in hand, we didn’t even stop to wondered if we were breaking any law as we rushed out of the office to my car. Rounding the corner Jane began to read. Right away we realized that an entire year was missing from my medical chart, a year when I had had three surgeries.

“Janet, this states that you had hip surgery and not knee surgery! Instead of being home-schooled and wheelchair bound—it says you were walking!”

“Too bad I didn’t request copies of my medical chart years ago.”

Once back to Jane’s, I called a cousin who was an attorney in Nebraska. I told him about Dr. Ulild’s confession and the hot medical file. He instructed me to make a copy of the entire chart, send it to him, and return it immediately.

The next day Jane and I headed back to Dr. Ulild’s office and anonymously returned the file. From there we drove to the courthouse. We wanted to discover if my doctors had been sued before, and if so, when and why. We found that my doctors were not new to litigation. Combined, they had been sued over fifty times.

We noticed several of the court files were stamped with the word “dismissed.” Not knowing what this word exactly meant, I walked and questioned the clerk.

“Means there was a pay off,” he said. “That’s what’s stamped when a case is settled out of court. Well, a judge may have tossed out one or two, or the plaintiff might have dropped his case, but for the most part, I’ll say —the doc’s made a deal!”

A lump formed in my throat, as I knew that when a doctor settled a lawsuit in California, this usually came with a confidentiality agreement that precluded the state medical board from being informed of any possible wrongdoing.

“Yea, but what happens when the same doctor keeps making mistakes, and he’s never reported?” I asked the clerk. His eyes met mine…

“People die ma’am. People die.”

Tomorrow Janet asks, “What should Christians do when they learn they’ve been victims of medical fraud?” While most of us know that the average cost for medical malpractice insurance is high for doctors, you may be surprised to hear what Janet Lynn Mitchell, author of Taking a Stand, discovers about her doctor as she goes up against the judicial system and finds herself in unfortunate circumstances.

Rest Ministries is happy to have Janet’s book, Taking a Stand, on sale currently in our bookstore for just $7.99. Taking a Stand is a true story about Janet, a 16-year-old girl who had complete trust in her orthopedic surgeons as she endured ten knee surgeries, due to what her physicians claimed was a genetic factor. Struggling with “how God made her” she never stopped believing she could walk! And one day she did. But then. . . what happens 15 years later when one of her surgeons confesses that the other doctor had done a rush-job on the first surgery and the following surgeries were just an attempt to cover up their medical error? Read more in Taking a Stand.

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