Two Medical Students Navigate the Health Care Maze - NYTimes.com

A burly Midwesterner in his mid-20s, he had entered medical school determined to become a primary care physician. But over the last two years, despite encouragement from mentors and good experiences helping patients at the local free clinic, the resolve of the young doctor-to-be had wavered. On the eve of his third year of medical school, he had become more apprehensive than ever.

One recent afternoon, seeing his eyes turn glassy and his smile freeze, I realized that my own attempt to encourage him was failing to restore his determination.

"I appreciate what you're trying to tell me," he said. "But there's a big difference between your experiences and mine." He paused to search for words to explain, then smiled when the television down the hall began blasting the latest news on health care reform.

"You knew what you were getting into when you started, but us," he said, gesturing toward the television, "we have no idea of what health care or our futures will look like."

For several years now, doctors and patients have been struggling to reimagine the future of health care. Policy makers, health care experts and pundits have been eager to help, churning out well-meaning op-eds and essays and cobbling together exhaustive blogs and books. Trying to help the rest of us understand, for example, they have described how Medicare will rely increasingly on "accountable care organizations" and "bundled payments" and eventually eliminate "the doughnut hole."

Unfortunately, there's been one problem with these earnest and well-intentioned attempts to help: It's hard to understand what they are saying. In fact, few of us fully understand how the health care system works in the first place, let alone what these august experts are trying to say.

Now Elisabeth Askin and Nathan Moore, medical students from the Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis, have set out to help all of us understand. Motivated by their own anxiety about the future, they have written "The Health Care Handbook" (self-published with their medical school), an astonishingly clear "user's manual" that explains our health care system and the policies that will change it.

It's the kind of book to share not only with your doctors and colleagues, but with your friends and Aunt Dorothy, too.

In their unpretentious voice, Ms. Askin and Mr. Moore make clear from the beginning that their explanations are neither in-depth nor definitive. But given their evenhanded and highly organized prose, it's hard not to put their book in the same revered category as a medical textbook or dictionary. In a mere 175 pages, and with an impressive roster of references and well-placed graphics, "The Health Care Handbook" illuminates the maddeningly opaque terms, acronyms, organizations, personages and policies that abound in health care. The authors do so not by expounding on the minutiae, but by jettisoning the jargon and gobbledygook and presenting only the core ideas.

For example, they explain the Affordable Care Act using a series of questions. In the process Ms. Askin and Mr. Moore distill the law's more than 2,000 pages --- "a little longer than a Harry Potter book," they deadpan - down to one of the best explanations I've seen. It can be read in under 20 minutes.

And thanks to their particularly winsome literary voice, what usually is mind-numbingly dull turns into a good and even occasionally funny read. "Everything is always more complicated than you think," the two authors write in the introduction, putting it in bold, italicized and underlined type to embellishing their warning. ("If we could have underlined that phrase obsessively in each copy of this book, we would have," they continue.)

That medical students, and not a group of rarefied experts, would write such a book comes as no surprise to some. "No one knows what is going to happen tomorrow," said Rebekah Apple of theAmerican College of Physician Executives, a professional organization that has begun reaching out to young doctors to help them develop management and leadership skills in the face of uncertainty. "But these young doctors are even more acutely aware of the shifting sands."

Unlike physicians who finished their education and training even a decade earlier, current medical students must learn to practice in a system that is constantly changing, and their medical schools, already overburdened with an ever-growing list of required courses and competencies, have few or no resources to help them. Many students have taken matters into their own hands, putting together health policy and economics discussion groups and lecture series for themselves.

The idea of "The Health Care Handbook" was hatched a little over a year ago in such a student-initiated discussion group. "We wanted to write the book we were looking for," Mr. Moore said. With guidance from Dr. William A. Peck, director of the Center for Health Policy at Washington University and former dean of the medical school, and the help of close to 50 expert and lay readers, Mr. Moore and Ms. Askin wrote the book in under a year while managing their medical school obligations.

With the future of health care wide open, "The Health Care Handbook" is being published primarily in e-book form to allow for quick revisions (the newest edition came out within a week of the Supreme Court decision). A paperback edition is scheduled to come out at the end of the summer, and there are plans to offer video modules and other supplemental materials.

While Ms. Askin and Mr. Moore still have a year or more of medical school to complete, they hope to keep the inspiration for the book and its future iterations in the hands of those who need it most. After they graduate, a group of students from their medical school will be chosen every year to update and revise the book as needed "to ensure that fresh student perspective."

"We wanted to write a book that would be like giving people little floaties to help them learn to swim through the vast and confusing ocean that is health care," Ms. Askin said.

She added: "It's exciting to us that our book could actually be helping people."

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/two-medical-students-navigate-the-health-care-maze/?pagewanted=print

Genetic Test Changes Game in Cancer Prognosis - NYTimes.com

In May 2011, Cassandra Caton, an 18-year-old with honey-colored hair and the soft features of a child, suddenly went blind in her right eye. Five months later, an ophthalmologist noticed something disturbing. A large growth in the back of her eye had ripped her retina, destroying her vision.

He sent her to Washington Universityin St. Louis, a three-hour drive from her sparsely furnished apartment in the working-class town of Sedalia, Mo.

And there, Ms. Caton, mother of a 2-year-old daughter, wife of a chicken factory worker, got almost incomprehensibly bad news. The growth was cancer, amelanoma, and it was so huge it filled her eyeball.

"Am I going to die?" Ms. Caton asked. "Is my baby going to have a mommy in five years?"

It is a question that plagues cancer patients. Doctors try to give survival odds based on a tumor's appearance and size, but often that is just an educated guess.

But Ms. Caton had a new option, something that became possible only in this new genetic age. She could have a genetic test of her tumor that could reveal her prognosis with uncanny precision. The test identifies one of two gene patterns in eye melanomas. Almost everyone in Class 1 — roughly half of patients — is cured when the tumor is removed. As for those in Class 2, 70 to 80 percent will die within five years. Their cancers will re-emerge as growths in the liver. For them, there is no cure and no way to slow the disease.

No test has ever been so accurate in predicting cancer outcomes, researchers said.

The data from studies of the test are "unbelievably impressive," said Dr. Michael Birrer, anovarian cancer specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital. "I would die to have something like that in ovarian cancer."

While for now the ocular melanoma test is in a class by itself, cancer researchers say it is a taste of what may be coming as they continue to investigate the genes of cancer cells. Similar tests, not always as definitive but nonetheless able to give prognostic information, are under development or starting to be used for other cancers, like cancers of the blood.

Having a prognosis allows people to plan their lives, but most do not want to know if they have a gene for an incurable, fatal illness, like Huntington's disease or early onsetAlzheimer's.

The eye test raises a similar choice, with an added twist. This is not a test offered to healthy people, but to patients who have just gotten the news that they have cancer. The results will either give them reassurance that they will survive the cancer — or near certainty that they will die from it.

Can patients in the throes of getting this terrifying news really make an informed choice about whether they want the test? Are they able to understand at such a fraught time that, for now at least, there is nothing that can save them if they get the bad prognosis?

Some doctors do not offer the test, reasoning that there is little to be gained.

But other doctors, including J. William Harbour of Washington University, who developed the test (but does not profit from its use), encourage patients to have it. And probably because of the way he describes it, Dr. Harbour says his patients almost always want it.

Ms. Caton was no exception. Without the test, doctors would have had to guess her outcome based on the size of her tumor. And the conventional wisdom is that people with growths as large as hers have a slim chance of surviving. But perhaps, her doctors hoped, the genetic test would come up with a different answer.

Heralding the Future

Dr. Harbour, a genial and burly man with salt-and-pepper hair, has a way about him that relaxes patients, makes them feel everything will be O.K.

"I give them as much information as I think they can handle," Dr. Harbour says.

And he's an optimist. The ocular melanoma test is just the beginning, he believes, of a new understanding of that cancer — and perhaps other cancers as well — and why they spread.

About 2,000 people a year, or about 5 percent of melanoma patients, have ocular melanoma, a tumor of the dark brown melanocytes that form a sheet much like a photographer's backdrop behind the retina. Those with very large tumors are most likely to have a bad prognosis, but patients with small tumors also can have the deadly type.

Often there are no symptoms; the tumor may be discovered by an ophthalmologist during a routine exam. Other patients, though, lose vision or see flashing lights or a sea of floaters in an eye, all signs of damage to the retina as the tumor encroaches.

Most get radiation, a highly radioactive disc placed on the surface of the eye that destroys the tumor in a few days and then is taken out. But those with huge tumors, like Ms. Caton, must have their eye removed.

Ocular melanoma specialists had long noticed that some patients did well and the rest did not, but Dr. Harbour wanted to know why.

Then he saw an opportunity. Ever since he came to Washington University in 1996, Dr. Harbour had been storing bits of tumors from ocular melanoma patients and keeping track of what happened to the patients. Working with his colleagues at the genome center, Dr. Harbour looked for genetic differences in tumors that spread and those that did not.

The genes themselves were no different. But a group of several hundred genes that looked the same in cells from patients in Class 1 and Class 2 were acting differently in the patients who did poorly. The genes were churning out many more proteins in the cells of patients in Class 2. Dr. Harbour found that he could look at the activity of 12 of those genes and predict how well a patient would do.

After a rigorous study to confirm that the test worked, the university licensed it to a small company, Castle Biosciences. They bill more than $6,000, with the price depending on the quality of the sample. But the company has programs to make sure that the poor or uninsured can receive the test, said Derek Maetzold, the company's president and chief executive.

Some cancer specialists, though, ask what is to be gained by using the test.

When it comes to dividing patients into two prognostic groups, "the data are really astonishing," said Dr. Keith Flaherty, a melanoma researcher at Massachusetts General. Yet, he added, "There is no treatment yet that will alter the natural history of the disease."

"Why would you want that information when we don't have anything we can do for you?" Dr. Flaherty asked. "That is the fundamental question that has caused people to pause."

For the majority treated with radiation, having the test requires a biopsy of the tumor before treatment. After going through that, those in Class 2 have no real options other than to wait for the inevitable.

Nothing has been shown to prolong the lives of Class 2 patients, said Dr. Evangelos S. Gragoudas, an ocular oncologist at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. Not more frequent monitoring of the liver, not more aggressive or earlier chemotherapy. Nothing.

Dr. Gragoudas tells patients that the ocular melanoma test is available. Then, he said, "I tell them that I do not do it at the present time. But if you want it, there are people who will do it."

"I had only one patient tell me, 'I want to know,' " Dr. Gragoudas said.

Dr. Harbour has a different view, and conveys it to his patients. He tells them that if they are Class 2 he will monitor them closely, doing liver scans every six months and blood tests in between, and will treat metastases with chemotherapy, delivered to the site of the cancer's spread, as they occur.

Patients sometimes think that means they can be cured, Dr. Harbour confesses, adding that he makes a point of repeating the information about what the test results mean on several different visits to be sure it sinks in.

Dr. Harbour says he believes that frequent monitoring and prompt treatment of the cancer may be extending some patients' lives, although that has not been rigorously established. Dr. Gragoudas says a study he did found that early treatment made no difference.

But Dr. Harbour says his approach means patients have a different sort of death. Before the gene test was developed, patients would not know their cancer had spread until they were at the end stages of their disease. Then they would suddenly shed weight, lose their appetite, fall ill and their skin would turn yellow from liver failure. Within a few months they would be dead.

Now, by finding the cancer as soon as it spreads to the liver, it often can be controlled, at least for a while. The cancer then tends to spread to the lung or bones, where it can also be controlled. Death still tends to be from cancer in the liver, but even if it occurs at the same time, it may be less painful, Dr. Harbour says.

"Would you want a horrible death that is relatively short," he asks, "or a death that is slower?"

Dr. Harbour thinks there may be ways to impede the cancer's progress in Class 2 disease by blocking a gene, BAP 1, that seems to be driving the cancer's spread. That is his hope for clinical trials with one of two treatments: a class of drugs known as histone deacetylase inhibitors, which were developed to fight cancer and are being tested against a cancer of white blood cells, or valproic acid, an old drug used to treat epilepsy that subsequently was found to be a histone deacetylase inhibitor.

But then again, if Class 2 patients, most of whom are doomed anyway, find out about valproic acid, which is cheap and easily available, would they really wait for a clinical trial, taking a chance they could be randomly assigned to take a placebo? Yet without a rigorous study, it will be impossible to know if the drug helps Class 2 patients.

'Praying for a Miracle'

Cassie Caton and an older man came in for their biopsy and treatment on a frigid morning in early December. Both would have to have their eyes removed — their tumors were too large for radiation.

First was Joe Ritter, age 70.

"We are praying for a miracle," his wife, Judy, said that morning, as Mr. Ritter sat silently in his bed, waiting to be wheeled into the operating room.

At 11:30 that morning, Ms. Caton's surgery began. Dr. Harbour looked at her dilated eye. There, visible behind her blue pupil, was a brown halo, the melanoma.

He began to work, carefully and efficiently, preserving and pinning back the muscles that control her eye's movement.

About an hour into the surgery, Dr. Harbour removed Ms. Caton's eyeball, cutting the optic nerve with scissors. Her eye looked like a white marble with a blue pupil on top and a little white wicklike stalk on the end, the stub of the optic nerve. He took the eyeball to a metal table and cut it open. It was filled with what looked like slices of brown olives, the melanoma. A fluid squirted out, the vitreous. Normally it would be clear and jellylike. But cancer had made it liquid and the color of weak tea.

Some of that cancer tissue would go to Castle Biosciences for analysis. The rest would be stored for future research.

Then Dr. Harbour covered a plastic ball about the size of Ms. Caton's eyeball with the outer layer from a cadaver's eyeball, and put it into her eye socket so the ball would move like her eye. Finally, he carefully sewed the controlling muscles in place. In about six weeks, an artist would paint a thick contact lens to match Ms. Caton's remaining eye, giving her a prosthesis that would be all but indistinguishable from her healthy eye.

Mr. Ritter would also end up with a prosthetic eye that would look and move just like his healthy one.

Both Ms. Caton and Mr. Ritter would return in about a month to find out if they were Class 1 or Class 2.

Awaiting the Verdict

On Jan. 9, they arrived to hear their verdicts. Mr. Ritter went first, bringing his wife with him into the small windowless room.

After a few pleasantries, Dr. Harbour delivered the news.

"Based on what we found from your biopsy result, it was Class 2," he said.

Mrs. Ritter looked stricken, her eyes filled with tears. She crossed the room and hugged her husband. Mr. Ritter grinned nervously while Dr. Harbour explained how he would like to monitor him. And, he said, he planned to start some clinical trials to see if he could slow the cancer in Class 2 patients. Perhaps Mr. Ritter could join one.

Then Dr. Harbour stepped out of the room, allowing the Ritters to compose themselves.

Mr. Ritter reflected on how the news about his eye had steadily worsened.

"I started out thinking it was a cold in my eye," he said. "Then I thought it was a cataract. Then they told me it was a torn retina. That turned into a tumor. Now it's a Class 2."

Mrs. Ritter tried to be positive.

"Maybe we caught it in time," she said. "We've got a lot of prayers coming our way."

Ms. Caton and her stepfather came in next. He had driven three hours from his home in Kansas City and picked her up in Sedalia. The two had arrived in St. Louis the night before.

She had been too nervous to sleep.

With few preliminaries, Dr. Harbour told her what the test showed.

"Your test result," he said, "was very good." Her tumor was not only Class 1 but it was a subset of Class 1 that had an even better prognosis than Class 1 in general. It was Class 1a.

"That is very, very good news," Dr. Harbour said.

"In the old days, the size of a tumor was the best indicator," he told Ms. Caton. "People would have told you, you were at very high risk," he said. "Your tumor was almost an inch in its largest dimension. Pathologists' eyes widened when they saw it. But molecular testing trumps all of that."

"If you did not have this test you would have walked away being told you have a bad prognosis when you actually have a good prognosis," he added.

Ms. Caton could not stop smiling. Then, still grinning, the 18-year-old asked her next question.

"When can I wear eye makeup again?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/health/genetic-test-changes-game-in-cancer-prognosis.html?&pagewanted=all

In Rory Staunton’s Fight for His Life, Signs That Went Unheeded - NYTimes.com

For a moment, an emergency room doctor stepped away from the scrum of people working on Rory Staunton, 12, and spoke to his parents.

"Your son is seriously ill," the doctor said.

"How seriously?" Rory's mother, Orlaith Staunton, asked.

The doctor paused.

"Gravely ill," he said.

How could that be?

Two days earlier, diving for a basketball at his school gym, Rory had cut his arm. He arrived at his pediatrician's office the next day, Thursday, March 29, vomiting, feverish and with pain in his leg. He was sent to the emergency room at NYU Langone Medical Center. The doctors agreed: he was suffering from an upset stomach and dehydration. He was given fluids, told to take Tylenol, and sent home.

Partially camouflaged by ordinary childhood woes, Rory's condition was, in fact, already dire. Bacteria had gotten into his blood, probably through the cut on his arm. He was sliding into a septic crisis, an avalanche of immune responses to infection from which he would not escape. On April 1, three nights after he was sent home from the emergency room, he died in the intensive care unit. The cause was severe septic shock brought on by the infection, hospital records say.

Because sepsis, a leading cause of death in hospitals, can at first look like less serious ailments, a campaign to aggressively identify it for early treatment has been undertaken by a consortium of 55 hospitals in the New York region, including NYU Langone.

Yet nowhere along Rory's journey, from boy with a bellyache on Thursday to gravely ill boy on Friday night, did anyone act on strong indications that he might be fighting for his life. Critical information gathered by his family doctor and during his first visit to NYU Langone either was not used, was not at hand or was not viewed as important when decisions were made about his care, records show.

Moments after an emergency room doctor ordered Rory's discharge believing fluids had made him better, his vital signs, recorded while still at the hospital, suggested that he could be seriously ill. Even more pointed signals emerged three hours later, when the Stauntons were at home: the hospital's laboratory reported that Rory was producing vast quantities of cells that combat bacterial infection, a warning that sepsis could be on the horizon.

The Stauntons knew nothing of his weak vital signs or abnormal lab results.

"Nobody said anything that night," Ms. Staunton said. "None of you followed up the next day on that kid, and he's at home, dying on the couch?"

NYU Langone declined to discuss any aspects of Rory's care or hospital procedures.

"Our deepest sympathies go out to the family at this difficult time," said Lisa Greiner, a hospital spokeswoman.

The Stauntons shared Rory's medical records with a reporter for The New York Times who had met the boy last summer in a social setting. A full airing of the case, along with a commitment to reforms, his parents said, could save lives. They have hired a lawyer, Thomas A. Moore, but have not decided how they will proceed.

•

Rory Staunton, 5 feet 9 inches tall and 169 pounds, was big for his age and a student of the world. "The most profound 12-year-old I had ever met," his debate coach, Kevin Burgoyne, said. For his birthday, his parents gave him flying lessons after Rory, who spent hours on a flight simulator, tracked down an aviation school that accepted students at 12. He devoured the memoir of Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the pilot who safely brought down an airliner on the Hudson River.

"I told him, 'Sully did some fast math landing that plane,' and for a short while, he was paying attention to math," said Ciaran Staunton, Rory's father. "Then he came back with, 'Yeah, but by the time I'm a pilot they'll have a faster way of doing it.' "

Rory and his sister, Kathleen, 10, grew up in Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, which their parents, Irish immigrants, regarded as a global village of sublime pleasures: shared courtyards, a rich brew of cultures and merry mobs of children rolling from house to house. Ms. Staunton, the former director of an international student exchange, said neighborhood kids formed their own country, Kidadelphia, designed a flag, and adapted the United States motto for their slogan: "In God and Fun We Trust." Rory was president. When he was 8, he raided his piggy bank to treat his parents to a Chinese dinner for their wedding anniversary. At the private Garden School in Jackson Heights, he was elected to the student council in seventh grade and led a campaign, Spread the Word to End the Word, to curtail the casual, derogatory use of the term "retarded."

Last summer, his uncle, a friend of this reporter, brought Rory, Kathleen and their mother to stay in my family's vacation home for two nights. Rory would go from barreling down a water slide backward to sizing up President Obama's prospects for re-election. Fascinated by North Korea, he tried to fathom how a country so afflicted by famine could afford a large army. (His parents recently found a note in his computer to the Swedish ambassador to North Korea.)

At home, said Mr. Staunton, a civic activist and bar owner, they would have nightly shouting matches over homework Rory had not done or dirty clothes he had not picked up, in between scoping out corners of global history.

During gym class on Wednesday, March 28, he dived for a ball and opened a cut on his arm. That night, Ms. Staunton said, Rory mentioned it: "How he presented it to me was, 'I fell in the gym. Mr. D, the athletic director, put the Band-Aids on. And, I got the ball.' "

Then he finished his homework and went to bed.

•

The bacteria Streptococcus pyogenes is part of the human ecosystem, normally dwelling in the throat or on the skin, areas where the body is well defended. Also known as Group A streptococcus, the strain typically causes strep throat or impetigo.

But if it is able to penetrate soft tissue or blood, "it moves very quickly," said Dr. Michael B. Edmond, the chairman of the division ofinfectious diseases at Virginia Commonwealth University. "The mortality rate is high. The clinical findings early in the infection can be relatively subtle."

The challenge for physicians is recognizing an invasive infection, whether from Group A strep or other pathogens, before the cascading damage of sepsis has picked up too much speed. The consortium of New York hospitals has a goal of starting antibiotics within an hour of spotting sepsis in the emergency room, according to officials with the Greater New York Hospital Association's Stop Sepsis program.

For every hour's delay in giving antibiotics after very low blood pressure had set in, a large study found, the survival rate decreased by 7.6 percent.

•

Shortly after midnight on March 29, Ms. Staunton heard Rory retching in the bathroom. "There wasn't a huge amount of vomit, but he kept saying, 'My leg, my leg, Mom,' " she recalled. Back in bed, he moaned. His mother rubbed his thigh. In the morning, he was weak, his leg still hurt, and his temperature was 104 degrees, his highest ever.

The parents began calling Dr. Susan Levitzky, who had been the family pediatrician for about five years. She saw Rory that evening.

"He was leaning on me as we were walking up to the office, because he could hardly stand from the weakness or pain in his leg," Ms Staunton said. In the waiting room, Rory vomited. When the doctor swabbed his throat, he vomited on her. The swab test, a rapid but not definitive detector of strep, was negative.

"We showed her the cut on his elbow, and I saw her follow up his arm from the cut," Ms. Staunton said. "She said, 'The cut's not an issue.' She focused on his stomach. We said, 'Although you see him throwing up, that's not what he's really complaining about.' Rory and I both said to her that it's the pain in his leg that's really bothering him."

The doctor told them that the leg pain might be from falling in the gym. "Rory said, 'It wasn't a fall, it was a skid,' " Ms. Staunton recalled.

The parents also remarked that Rory's skin became blotchy when they pressed a finger on it. Those concerns were well-founded, said Dr. Edmond, the infectious disease specialist, who was not involved in Rory's care: the mottling, which Dr. Levitzky made note of, could mean that vessels in his skin were constricting from low blood pressure; the leg pain could mean an invasive infection. Rory's temperature was 102 and his pulse was 140; he was breathing 36 times a minute. These, too, were "worrisome" observations, Dr. Edmond said.

Nevertheless, Ms. Staunton said, she did not recall being told that any of his vital signs were off: "She said, 'Make your way over to NYU, and get him rehydrated. He's vomiting now. He's going to feel better, and tomorrow, he'll have diarrhea.' "

In a brief phone conversation, Dr. Levitzky said she could not discuss the case. "I sent him to a major medical center," she said.

•

Rory arrived at NYU Langone, on First Avenue near 34th Street, at 7:14 that evening and was discharged about two hours later. Hospital records do not reflect any communication with Dr. Levitzky or her findings about the mottled skin.

Like Dr. Levitzky, the NYU physicians believed that Rory's discomfort was caused by a sick stomach and dehydration. His chart states that "labs, I.V.F., Zofran" were ordered. Zofran is an anti-nausea drug; two bags of intravenous fluids, or I.V.F., were administered; three vials of blood were drawn and sent to the hospital laboratory.

"They did the various checks, up, down, back and forth," Mr. Staunton said.

A screening tool in the Stop Sepsis program, used when a patient first arrives in the emergency room, calls special attention to a person with three symptoms of a possible eight. At the hospital, Rory showed two: he was breathing 20 times per minute and his pulse was 143.

Two hours later, though, he had three: his temperature had risen to 102, his pulse was 131 and his respiration rate was 22. But by the time those vital signs were recorded, at 9:26 p.m., they had no bearing on his treatment. In fact, the doctor had already decided that Rory was going home. Rory's "ExitCare" instructions, signed by his father, were printed 12 minutes before those readings.

To the pediatrician who examined and discharged Rory, it seemed that the fluids had done the trick. "Pt improved," the doctor, Camille Scribner, wrote, prescribing "home supportive care." There is no sign in the records that Dr. Scribner, described by a senior colleague as "hyper-conscientious," considered alternative explanations.

"They stated that it was a common flu that was going around," Mr. Staunton said. "It would start off as high temperature and throwing up, and would end up as diarrhea."

Dr. Scribner could not be reached for comment through the hospital.

As the Stauntons walked Rory onto First Avenue, the air temperature was in the mid-40s. "He was freezing," Ms. Staunton said. "He took my coat leaving the hospital. It has a little frilly thing around the collar."

"Not a thing that a boy of 12 would put on," Mr. Staunton said.

•

About three hours later, Rory's lab results were printed. He was producing neutrophils and bands, white blood cells, at rates that were "very abnormal and would suggest a serious bacterial infection," Dr. Edmond said.

The Stauntons said they heard nothing about it. In bed, Rory "was groaning in his sleep," Ms. Staunton said. "I felt the heat of the fever."

At 10 a.m. on Friday, the Stauntons began calling their pediatrician, Dr. Levitzky. "She told us to do a combination of Tylenol and Motrin," Ms. Staunton said.

Asked last month about the lab findings, Dr. Levitzky, who is associated with NYU Langone, said, "I never knew that testing was done."

Rory did have the predicted bout of diarrhea on Friday, which momentarily elated his family. Still, he could barely get to the bathroom. The doctor suggested fluids and crackers.

"'I told her, 'I'm not sure you're getting the picture, Dr. Levitzky,' " Mr. Staunton said. "'I can't even get him to sit up. I don't know how you expect me to get food into him.' "

Later, a slight touch would make him scream. "Around his nose was gone blue," Mr. Staunton said. "Down his body side was gone blue."

At that point, Dr. Levitzky told them to return to the emergency room. They supported him as he walked to the car. "All he said was, 'Can I please have a wheelchair when I get there?' " Ms. Staunton recalled.

In the intensive care unit, his parents tried to mask their worry, Mr. Staunton chatting lightly. But Ms. Staunton noticed her son's eyes following her. "He said, 'Mom, my toes are really, really cold,' " she said.

After extending an arm for blood to be drawn, "he thanked them when they were finished," Ms. Staunton said.

He had to be put on a ventilator. Just before he was sedated, Ms. Staunton said, "They told him, 'We need to figure some stuff out. There are some marks on your body, and you need a little bit of help breathing, so we're just going to intubate you and it'll be fine.' " First, though, they checked his mental status.

"Do you know what date it is?"

"I know it's March," Rory answered.

"Who's the president of the United States?"

He answered: "Barack Obama."

His mother smiled.

"Ah," she said, "but Rory, who is going to be the next one?"

"Barack Obama," he said.

As the next two days passed, doctors tried anything that might halt the shutdown of Rory's organs. "I can't say enough about the I.C.U.," Ms. Staunton said.

Relatives and a priest gathered bedside, talking of Irish football and tomfoolery and politics. Perhaps, one doctor whispered in a fleeting, hopeful aside, Rory might get away with losing his toes and nose. His skin blackened. He passed no urine. His blood would not clot. His heart had to be restarted twice. Three specialists who chronicled Rory's decline on his intensive care chart each noted that on Thursday night, when he was sent home from the emergency room, he had a fever and significant signs of infection in his blood.

On Sunday night, Dr. Mayer Sagy, who had not seen Rory on his first visit to the hospital but spent the weekend struggling to keep Rory alive, told the Stauntons that the team had been unable to resuscitate him a third time.

"I said to him, 'I brought him here to you the other night and you sent him home,' " Ms. Staunton said.

"He said, 'You have every right to be angry.' "

More than anything, the Stauntons said, NYU Langone owes an honest accounting of what happened. Racked with loss, they and othersremembered Rory as an unflinching champion of schoolyard underdogs.

"Above all," Ms. Staunton said, "we know that Rory would want no other child to go through what he went through."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/nyregion/in-rory-stauntons-fight-for-his-life-signs-that-went-unheeded.html?

Getting your tubes tied: Why do young women have a hard time getting sterilized? - Slate Magazine

There are some people who don't want to have kids. Then there are some people who really don't want to have kids. As we learned in a recent Double X series of essays exploring this choice, some men and women never heed (or even feel) the tick of the biological clock. But others are more proactive. Monica Trombley is in the latter camp. As described in her piece, Trombley decided at the age of 26 that permanent sterilization by tubal ligation—a procedure colloquially called "getting your tubes tied"—was the right choice for her.

But as Trombley quickly learned, many gynecologists disagreed. After consulting a number of doctors who tried to dissuade her for what she describes as "paternalistic" reasons, Trombley finally became so exasperated that she actually considered inventing dangerous and unavoidable family members in order to convince a doctor that she could not live in an environment fit for children. (In the end, she found a specialist who required less cajoling.)  

"Why should an adult woman be forced to lie to her doctor about why she wants to be sterilized?" she asked.

Trombley's article inspired many, many readers to write in with similar tales of medical odysseys. Often, these women complained of being referred from physician to physician, only to receive a version of, "You'll change your mind" or, "You'll regret this later in life." While some were ultimately successful in their tube-tying quest, others simply gave up, settling for a partner's vasectomy or contraception. All expressed anger at the resistance they encountered in getting what they assumed to be an uncontroversial and wholly elective—even socially responsible—procedure.

Victoria Amrhein, a 23-year-old living in Jacksonville, Fla., detailed her frustration in an email:

Each doctor I went to had the same story—the new ones straight out of med school or the ones who'd been around the block for 30 years. I discussed the fact that getting abortions is much more dangerous than being sterilized and the fact that every time I got pregnant I could get one, but I am unable to get sterilized. It amazed me that they were OK (well at least open) to the fact of having abortions, but not of permanent sterilization which would prevent my ever needing an abortion! … I do believe I faced quite a bit of discrimination.

But is it discrimination for a gynecologist to recommend against or even refuse to provide sterilization? Partly, the issue is one of perception. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends that doctors provide in-depth and "individualized" counseling of patients seeking sterilization (including a thorough discussion of permanence and other available options). So what some patients take as a condescending lecture or arm-twisting might actually be an OB following professional guidelines.  

Ultimately, though, the advisory organization does not recommend discouraging or refusing the procedure to anyone who is otherwise medically fit and of the age of consent. It is, after all, a legal procedure. Various forms of female sterilization have been legal in the United States since 1972, when courts removed restrictions that had previously required a medical threat. And according to a 2008 treatment review in Obstetrics and Gynecology, "[A]lmost all women are candidates for these minimally invasive procedures." So what's the problem?

From a doctor's point of view, just because a patient can have a procedure doesn't necessarily mean that she should. While Yekaterina Rabkin, a gynecologist who practices in Winchester, Va., has never outright refused to do a tubal ligation on a patient who's qualified, she does everything she can to encourage an alternative course of action. 

"My personal opinion is that the only time a tubal is preferable to LARCs [Long Acting Reversible Contraception] for someone who is done with childbearing is if it's done during a C-section, where it is a minor part of an otherwise major surgery," she explained. "Otherwise, you expose someone to surgical risk without any improvement in efficacy, a higher risk of ectopic pregnancy [due to procedural failure], and the issue of regret … I genuinely believe that a tubal ligation is not the best option for contraception for most people."

So how does it even work? As Rabkin notes, a tubal can be performed with very little trouble just after birth, especially during a C-section. In this case, a section of each of the easily accessible fallopian tubes is removed and the ends sealed, preventing eggs from traveling to the uterus. A similar procedure, called minilaparotomy, which is most often used after vaginal birth, involves raising the fallopian tubes to a small incision site in the abdomen in order to occlude them.

For women seeking sterilization outside of the delivery suite, a procedure called laparoscopy is the most common option: After pumping the abdomen full of gas, the physician will access the fallopian tubes through a small incision with a thin, lighted tube. Then the tubes can be ligated using a variety of clips, bands, or cuts. The only nonsurgical option for ligation is the Essure transcervical device, a method in which a doctor inserts a coil of stainless steel and other materials into each of the fallopian tubes, where, upon expanding, they stimulate tissue growth around the coil and, ultimately, result in blockage of the tubes.

All of these procedures are relatively safe—the death rate is 1 to 2 per 100,000 for all surgical methods, according to the 2008 review, and a 2000 study found that almost all complications were connected to other health factors, like obesity, and not the procedure itself. But ligation still comes with some small risk of infection, bleeding, and negative anesthesia reactions, not to mention the possibility that it may not even work. According to the Collaborative Review of Sterilization (CREST) study, the 10-year probability of pregnancy following a ligation is 18.5 per 1,000 procedures, about seven of which could be ectopic, depending on surgical method and age.

But do these potential complications explain why doctors are resistant to perform sterilization? After all, there are many elective surgeries that carry the same, if not greater, risks.

My first thought, like yours, I bet, was that doctor hesitance must have to do with malpractice. But though a patient could potentially sue for a "wrongful birth" if the sterilization fails, it's far more difficult to litigate if what's at issue is her regret over having the procedure in the first place. For a court to take such a claim seriously, the claimant would have to show that she did not give informed consent. Considering how seriously practitioners take pre-sterilization counseling (especially with this country's fraught history of forced sterilization), not to mention the considerable amount of "thinking time" built into the process—Medicaid, for instance, requires a wait period of 30 days in addition to whatever time it takes to get on the surgery schedule—a successful suit isn't likely.

But while it might be difficult to sue for regret, that doesn't make the possibility of second thoughts any less real. According to analyses of the CREST data, there is a cumulative 12.7 percent probability that any woman would express regret within 14 years of sterilization. But for women under the age of 30 at the time of the procedure, there is a 20.3 percent cumulative probability that they would eventually want to take it all back (compared to only 5.9 percent in the older cohort). Of course, there are other factors that may predict regret, including partner/doctor pressure and disagreement among partners about the procedure. However, the CREST research shows that sterilization at a young age is the strongest predictor of regret. (Incidentally, this trend holds true with young men getting vasectomies.)

So what about reversal? We have the technology. But as Dr. Rabkin puts it, "It is probably going to be more invasive, not be covered by insurance, and not be likely to succeed." While statistics vary (25 percent to 87 percent reversal success rates, depending on the ligation method and time since the original procedure), most women—even those who deeply regret their decision—do not actually get one: The 14-year cumulative probability of requesting information about a reversal is 14.3 percent (40.4 percent among women 18-24 at the time of sterilization), but only 1.1 percent of women will actually request the procedure. Post-tubal pregnancy is also possible by IVF, but, once in this territory, the chances of success are slim in inverse proportion to the heft of the medical bills.

So what many women experience as "discrimination" at their OB's office, doctors seem to regard as protection against future emotional pain. But this raises the question of whether a medical professional has any business worrying about a patient's hypothetical future feelings in the first place. Where you stand on this may depend on how you define "harm" in a medical sense; after all, a core tenet of medicine's Hippocratic tradition is to do none. So what happens when a doctor considers regret—immediate or in the future—as harm? Is the physician who performed the ligation on a 24-year-old (knowing that there was some significant possibility that she would later regret her decision) responsible for her 35-year-old heartache?

Medical ethicists take this question very seriously. Philosopher Piers Benn and gynecologist Martin Lupton considered the issue in a 2005 paper, writing that one must first decide if so-called "lifestyle" surgeries fall under the purview of medicine, and, if so, should patient autonomy be respected, even when the doctor feels it's not in that person's best interest?

If autonomy is the issue, the idea to explore is that the putative late wish to be able to have children is more autonomous than the earlier wish never to have any, perhaps because we get more experienced and mature as we get older. Although this may sometimes be true, it will not always be. The fact that one wish comes later than another one does not make its fulfillment better for me, nor does it make it more autonomous. Rather, we simply face a judgment call based on the facts of the particular situation.

Benn and Lupton come down on the side of the patient, though not gently: While the authors write that later regret "should not be a factor in a doctor's decision about whether sterilization is in the patient's best interest," they also offer no balm for the patient's future emotional distress. If a young woman's resoluteness is as valid as an older woman's regret, the doctor's hands are clean.

Dr. Denise Jamieson, a practicing physician and chief of the Women's Health and Fertility Branch at the Centers for Disease Control, is also supportive of a patient's right to choose, though she notes that the statistics don't lie. "As a clinician, I know that regret is so common. Patients come in heart-broken because the situation has changed, and now they desperately want a child. It makes you feel bad as their physician," she said.

However, Jamieson sees her role first and foremost as an educator and adviser, not as the decider. "Ultimately, it is the patient who makes the decision. It's not my role to guess what they will feel in the future."

But, as our reader reports demonstrate, Jamieson and the ACOG may be out of touch with what's actually going on in the examination room.

In a 2010 survey of American gynecologists, researchers found that doctors responded to hypothetical patients' requests differently depending on age, number of children, and spousal agreement. For a 26-year-old with one child and a disagreeing husband, almost 70 percent of physicians were "somewhat or very likely to discourage her." Predictably, older imaginary women with more children and accordant husbands were far less controversial.

Interestingly, the gender of the physician had no measurable effect on his or her opinion, suggesting that paternalistic sexism is not at play (that is, unless you count the fact that there are no wait-time restrictions on vasectomies). And moreover, the vast majority of OBGYNs (91 percent) said they would eventually provide the service if the patient insisted (7 percent would refer and only 2 percent would refuse). As the study notes, though, "self reports may differ from clinical practices."

During our conversation, Jamieson stated very directly that, when it comes down to it, "Doctors should offer medically appropriate care." I was relieved—finally, a straightforward answer! But as it turns out, it's not that simple. 

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/07/getting_your_tubes_tied_why_do_young_women_have_a_hard_time_getting_sterilized_.single.html