Lisa Freeman

I have always been a fighter and so has my husband, Rory. I have even thought about going to law school to be a more effective advocate and somehow try to do something to change the system.

This all began over 10 years ago when Rory was just 37 and our kids were eight and three. Rory slipped and fell on his back. This began our odyssey through the healthcare industry. Let me be clear. We have had some wonderful physicians to whom we will always be grateful. But we have also had incompetent doctors whose arrogance has led to flawed decisions.

Briefly put, a neurosurgeon performed the wrong type of operation, operated on the wrong spinal levels and failed to relieve spinal cord compression and further injured an already injured spinal cord. As a result Rory suffered paralysis, bowel dysfunction, bladder dysfunction, intra operative brain damage, multiple strokes and short term memory loss. Excruciating and disabling pain has led to depression.

As awful as that sounds, it does not really convey the depth and breadth of this experience for our family.

Rory is confined to a hospital bed most of the time and that wonderful mind of his, which had a photographic memory, now has cognitive short-term memory problems. Our children have grown up not being able to camp or hike or do all those wonderful things kids do with their father.

What I have learned:

When malpractice occurs it is just the beginning. Because of that error, bad things just keep happening. Rory gets pneumonia about twice a year now, a staph infection that was introduced to his system during his original surgery, continues to recur and weaken him from time to time, and smaller insults to his system often have grave consequences.

When one thing goes wrong a hundred things go wrong.

Problems continually crop up and we both work to solve them one problem at a time. There is no normal, only what has become normal to us. We now have severely limited access, as individuals as a couple and as a family, to the texture and diversity that life has to offer.

What we have lost is priceless. Yet it is grossly unfair to place a restriction on our right to justice and recovery in the face of this profound loss. Victims' full access to the courts must be preserved, and every effort must be made to reduce situations of malpractice in the first place.