Michael Downing - Life with Sudden Death: A Tale of Moral Hazard and Medical Misadventure
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- Book:Life with Sudden Death: A Tale of Moral Hazard and Medical Misadventure
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Life with Sudden Death: A Tale of Moral Hazard and Medical Misadventure: summary, description and annotation
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The youngest of nine children, Michael Downing was three when his father died suddenly and inexplicably. No autopsy was performed. The family diagnosis was Gods will.
As a boy, Downing rigorously trained as a spiritual athlete, preparing to vault into heaven. But eventually he escaped the religious dogma, and the family arena until one of his brothers died in 2003, suddenly and inexplicably. No autopsy was performed.
Alarmed, Downing pursued a diagnosis: Drawn into a world of researchers, clinicians, and manufacturers with their own arcane ethics and faith, Downing discovered he had inherited a mutant protein from his father, and the first symptom would be his sudden death.
To save his life, a defibrillator was hardwired to his heart. Within weeks, he needed emergency surgery to remove the device and the lifethreatening infection he got with it. Two months later, he was reimplanted only to read in his morning newspaper that the new wires anchored to his heart were prone to failure. His device might be powerless, or it might deliver a series of unwarranted, possibly fatal, shocks.
From a bedeviled boyhood in the Berkshires to a grim comedy of errors in one of Bostons best hospitals, Life with Sudden Death is a wild ride.
As a boy, Downing rigorously trained as a spiritual athlete, preparing to vault into heaven. But eventually he escaped the religious dogma, and the family arena until one of his brothers died in 2003, suddenly and inexplicably. No autopsy was performed.
Alarmed, Downing pursued a diagnosis: Drawn into a world of researchers, clinicians, and manufacturers with their own arcane ethics and faith, Downing discovered he had inherited a mutant protein from his father, and the first symptom would be his sudden death.
To save his life, a defibrillator was hardwired to his heart. Within weeks, he needed emergency surgery to remove the device and the lifethreatening infection he got with it. Two months later, he was reimplanted only to read in his morning newspaper that the new wires anchored to his heart were prone to failure. His device might be powerless, or it might deliver a series of unwarranted, possibly fatal, shocks.
From a bedeviled boyhood in the Berkshires to a grim comedy of errors in one of Bostons best hospitals, Life with Sudden Death is a wild ride.
Michael Downing: author's other books
Who wrote Life with Sudden Death: A Tale of Moral Hazard and Medical Misadventure? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
David Downing
David Downing
David Downing
Taylor Downing
Lana Laws Downing
John D.H. Downing
Antonio Michael Downing
Jane Downing
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Table of Contents
Guide
Table of Contents
for Peter Bryant
The peculiar striations that define someones personality are too numerous to know, no matter how close the observer. A person we think we know can suddenly become someone else when previously hidden strands of his character are called to the fore by circumstance.
Elliot Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity
Elementary School
1. Occupational Hazards
Sister Rose was young for a nun. She had blue eyes and sometimes cried in class, so I was not surprised years later when I heard shed left the convent. Her blond hair often caused her problems by sticking out around her ears, and there was a lot of whispering during recess about her not being holy enough to shave her head like a total nun. I think she might have been a rookie when I had her. She often had to go out into the hall to adjust her veil, and instead of lying, shed tell us all exactly what shed been up to out there. This was a mistake. It let us know we could leave class to get a drink of water or pee whenever we felt like it.
During the first week of school, I noticed that Sister Rose didnt know half the things my kindergarten teacher had known. For instance, she tried to force us to take naps while sitting in our chairs with our heads resting on our wooden desks. By the second week, some kids just ignored her and went back to the cloakroom and curled up on their jackets for half an hour. Also, she never prepared snacks, and when we complained about it, she told us that snacks werent the teachers responsibility. This didnt inspire confidence.
Our lessons never went as well as she hoped they would. Reading groups were a perfect example. First of all, when she divided us all up, she pretended to think really hard before choosing a bird name for each group. Notre Dame was a Catholic school, so most kids had plenty of older brothers and sisters. We knew what was coming. You just hoped you didnt get labeled as a chickadee or some other puny bird. Second, Sister Rose pretended the sparrows were just as good as anybody else, as if first-graders had never heard of the American bald eagle. Third and worst of all, after we got into our groups, instead of patrolling the aisles with a ruler or some other weapon, Sister Rose usually sat on her desk at the front of the classroom, smiling and swinging her legs. She looked like a swimming instructor who forgot to take off her shoes. Nobody was afraid of her.
Birds will be birds. A blue jay would overhear a stupid mistake in another group and crack a joke, and one of the girl chickadees would start bawling halfway through her out-loud sentence. Sister Rose would call her up to the front of the classroom and make her stand there until she stopped crying. Then one of the robins would start chirping and flapping his wings like a scared baby chick, and hed be called up to the front, along with a couple of the other boys who thought he was so funny. As a result, Sister Rose was constantly sharing the stage with the most entertaining kids in first grade.
I liked Sister Rose for her unmanageable hair and her blue eyes and because she allowed a few of us to work ahead when she was having discipline problems. Still, I had my doubts. I complained about her to my best friend, Joey T., early in the school year.
Joey T. lived across the street from me in a duplex that his family owned. They needed the rent because their father worked for General Electric, which forced men to get up early and leave the house before their kids ate breakfast. My family was proud of GEs patriotic past, like when the Nazis hand-wrote a secret list of bomb targets in America and made Pittsfield number two. We were right after Washington and Boston, which were in a perfect tie for first place because of the White House and Bostons Irish Catholic population, including most of my parents relatives. Still, we couldnt forgive GE for taking people who just wanted a decent life for their families and turning them into working men who couldnt afford half the stuff I took for granted, which explained Joey T.s getting his haircuts on the front porch without the advice of a barber.
Joey T. had bowl-cut silvery blond hair, and because he was half Polish, he was a big kid. Older boys and teachers used to put pressure on him by telling him he was a natural-born football player, but he always shrugged it off like they had him mixed up with somebody elsenamely, his older brother Chucky. Chucky T. was already a sports star. He was the exactly the same age as my brother Gerard, who was sixth oldest out of the nine Downings but the smartest kid ever to come down the pike, by his own admission. As a result of being compared unfavorably to our famous brothers, Joey T. and I never got into competitions. For instance, I could freely admit his mother was a better baker than my mother based on sampling her drop cookies, both with and without the chocolate frosting. We stayed friends, even though Joey T. usually was not allowed to work ahead because he was apt to devote an hour of class time to unbending a paper clip and getting it stuck in some unusual place, like the zipper of his pants or his gums. Hed made the trip to the front of the class more than once, but he told me hadnt noticed anything wrong with Sister Rose while he was up there.
I knew if I complained to my brother Joe, who was in third grade already, hed probably tell me to offer it up. Hed be serious. Joe and I shared a bedroom, so I eventually complained to him anyway.
To my delight, Joe said I was in a serious situation. He said Mom would tell me to offer it up, so leave her out of the loop. He advised me to write a report stating everything Sister Rose was doing wrong and then leave it on her desk. When he thought about it some more, he said I should write the exact same report again and mail it to the principal of the school because I wasnt a good enough writer yet to use carbon copying paper in public. This made me mad, so I reminded him he was famous for his bad penmanship. Joe hated being criticized for things that werent his fault. He reminded me that the second-grade teacher had made him write something on the blackboard a thousand times and ruined his right hand forever. He also said, I know the Nazi death grip. I can cut off your blood supply.
I said, If I had brass knuckles on, I could punch you and go through your skull.
Id have a steel helmet, then, he said, and a Bowie knife, which is designed to spill your guts and make it feel like nothing, or maybe a paper cut, before you bleed to death.
About half of our many fights were hypothetical. Joe was a history buff and won most of them.
It was soon after Joe threatened to eviscerate me that Sister Rose made all the first-graders stand up and say aloud what their fathers did for a living. We had to do it by last names, alphabetically, she said. After a dramatic pause, Sister Rose added, but starting with the letter Z. The backwards rule caught us off guard, which we liked. This was the sort of teacher story you could take home to dinner. Sister Rose was starting to get the hang of it.
I only remember two of the jobsthat is, if Joey T.s father was a welder at General Electric, and Barbara Jeans father repaired televisions and radios. I wasnt paying strict attention. I was nervous. When we got near the Ds, I wasnt even sure whether I should stand up or just stay seated, but Sister Rose nodded and smiled, so I stood up.
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