Word: johnson
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...Robert Johnson, a busy Southern California orthopedic surgeon, skidded instantly from doctor to patient one day as he walked toward the operating room, scrubbed hands raised, and slipped on a freshly mopped floor. He broke the scaphoid bone in his right wrist, a bone that anchors all the bones in the hand, especially vital for the physically demanding work of an orthopedic surgeon...
...called on a friend who was a renowned hand specialist. "I knew the procedure well," he says. "Remove the scar tissue and place a tendon from my own body to stabilize the other hand bones." Naked under his hospital gown, Johnson was rolled into the operating room cracking jokes with his doctor. "I felt bad to be a bother," he says. Together Johnson and his friend decided to go with general anesthesia. An hour later, Johnson woke up and said, laughing, "That was quick...
...friend the surgeon was distraught. He had used a tool called a rongeur to chew up the scar tissue and had accidentally chewed up the scaphoid bone--ending Johnson's ability to do orthopedic surgery. "The actual damage happened in a matter of seconds," he says. "I heard later that he had told my wife while I was still under anesthesia. She said, 'You go and fix it before he wakes up!' What she didn't know was that there are some things that can't be fixed...
...Although Johnson thinks his case was a "rare aberrant fluke," that's not exactly true. More than 1 in 3 doctors in a 2002 survey by the Harvard School of Public Health reported errors in their own or a family member's medical care. Dr. Robert Wachter, chief of the medical service at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, who co-wrote last year's best seller Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America's Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes, says he has seen it all: patients who had the wrong leg amputated, were given the wrong (and deadly...
...world's major powers got together, there was anticipation for weeks. In Vienna in 1961, the Cold War took a turn for the worse as Kennedy and Khrushchev squared off over Berlin, and in Glassboro, N.J., in 1967 it took a turn for the better as Lyndon Johnson and the Soviet leader met days after the Six-Day War and the defection of Joseph Stalin's daughter to the U.S caused outrage in Moscow. In Iceland in 1986, Gorbachev and Reagan met and almost banned nuclear weapons. When Chinese President Hu Jintao came to the White House on Thursday...