Patient safety advocate, Mike Moran's sermon on medical negligence

Reverand Mike Moran went to DC with the Center for Justice and Democracy to talk to our Congressional delegation about medical negligence. Here is the sermon he wrote when he returned home.  Mike, thank you.

When I typed in this week’s sermon title my spell checker kept telling me that felicitude was not a word.  Felicity was easily recognized as meaning happiness, but I thought faith and felicity sounded a bit too close to an eharmony.com double date, so I stuck with felicitude – it rhymes with gratitude.   I didn’t have much time since I was going to be out of town Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, so the sermon title decision had to be made first thing Monday.

The reason I was out of town had very little to do with faith or felicitude.  Some of you know that in 2004 my mother in law was permanently disabled by a medication overdose in the hospital.  The medical error was compounded by the fact that we went ten weeks making life and death decisions without knowing that her condition was caused by medical error.  Even when we were told about the overdose, it took three more years and forcing people to testify under oath before we really understood what went wrong.  It surprised me to learn that in Connecticut a medical error has to be reported to the state, but there is no law that the patient or the family of the patient has to be told.  I was put in touch with the Connecticut Center for Patient Safety who works on these kinds of issues at the state level, and through that contact got asked to travel to Washington last week to speak with our Representatives and Senators about making patient safety a priority in health care reform. 

There were groups from all over the country, and each group went to meet their own Congressional delegation.  We met with Murphy and Himes and staff for DeLauro and Lieberman, but the people I really got to know were the five other families from Connecticut who traveled to DC to tell their stories.  The stories ranged from terrible to tragic – we were a parade of sadness.  I spent the most time with a retired United States Marine Colonel whose daughter had died after a medication error which then was covered up by attempts to alter hospital records.  His case involved criminal indictments and  prosecution.  My repeated point was that my car in the hospital parking lot had greater protection under the law than any of us did as patients inside – at least if someone did significant damage to your car and failed to report it they would be subject to arrest, but you could be permanently disabled in the hospital and the wall of denial and silence would go unpunished.

Some of the people in our small group from Connecticut had been to hell and back, but I tell you they had a resilience about them, a determination to press forward that was most remarkable.   Not all the time we spent together was dark and grim, there was sympathy, empathy, community, and even moments of felicity as we worked our way from building to building, from elevators to tunnels, from security checkpoints that sounded loud alarms at some of the prosthetic hardware, from small cramped offices to the spacious Rayburn room just off the chamber of the House where congressmen scurried in and out between votes.   It was not the pomp and privilege of power that most impressed me that day, it was the fortitude and faith of my companions that I will never forget.

What gives people the capacity to rebound from sadness to happiness, from hopelessness to optimism, from grief to joy?  I don’t think you can underestimate the role faith plays in these transformations.  And of all the descriptions I’ve read of this kind of sustaining faith, one of the clearest comes from someone who was famous, like Bartimaeus, for being blind.  This is from The Open Door by Helen Keller.

A simple, childlike faith in a Divine Friend solves all the problems that come to us by land or sea.  Difficulties meet us at every turn.  They are the accompaniment of life.  They result from combinations of character and individual idiosyncrasies.  The surest way to meet them is to assume that we are immortal and that we have a friend who “slumbers not, nor sleeps,” and who watches over us and guides – if we but let Him.  With this thought strongly entrenched in our inmost being, we can do almost anything we wish and need not limit the things we think.  We may help ourselves to all the beauty of the universe that we can hold.  For every hurt there is recompense of tender sympathy.  Out of pain grow the violets of patience and sweetness, the vision of the Holy Fire that touched the lips of Isaiah and kindled his life into spirit, and the contentment that comes with the evening star.  The marvelous richness of human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were not limitations to overcome.  The hilltop hour would not be half so wonderful if there was no dark valley to traverse.