- Nothing to pay
- No deductions from your compensation
- Access to UK's leading personal injury solicitors
- Excellent claim success rate
- Friendly, supportive and genuine staff
- Impartial legal advice without any cost or commitment
This requires Flash
Clinical negligence - from personal to professional interest
Working for a personal injury compensation claim company it is only natural that I should have an interest in claims relating to incidents of clinical negligence.
Yet this interest is also supported by acute personal experience of such an incident. In fact, in many ways it can be said that had my father not suffered a misdiagnosis of cancer when I was only 9 years old I might not be working in this job today.
Much as the way many psychologists enter their profession because of close, usually familial experiences of mental illness, so too do those in the civil litigation professions. We often do so because bitter and formative experiences have taught them the importance of civil redress where people's health and personal safety have been affected by negligence.
My dad's bravery in the face of clinical negligence
I still remember my father coming home relieved, having been told that he had only a benign cyst beneath his left knee. It had been troubling him for some time and although he initially accepted the diagnosis, a remaining suspicion that something wasn't right meant he went back a second, then a third, and then a fourth time to only be told the same thing.
It was only a fifth investigation by a private specialist that led to the correct diagnosis. Although my old man acted with typical bravery about the whole thing, shielding my sisters and me from the facts, he could not shelter us from the inevitable anxieties we felt when he was checked into hospital for surgery.
Nor too could he do anything about us overhearing our mother on the telephone late at night, tearfully telling her sister that the fact that the cancer had gone so long unchecked lead to my dad needing to have his leg amputated.
Such thoughts are hard for anyone to deal with, especially children, who often don't yet have the cognitive or emotional processes to entertain such prospects. That night I cried, wondering if my dad would ever be the same again, and desperately clinging to the hope that all would be all right and we would still be able to play football together.
Although things were all right eventually, my father did lose a big chunk of his leg but only a small portion of his calf muscle, the experience has lived with me.
For the rest of my youth I found it very difficult to trust health professionals and was suddenly and precociously aware both of basic human fallibility and the tenuous mortality of those around me. Perhaps it was too soon.
Pirate Shark Bite
At least the wound left by the operation provided a platform for some entertaining fibs. One summer, at the party to celebrate my sister's fifth birthday, my dad answered a series of children's queasy questions about his still-raw wound by explaining that it had happened as a result of being made to walk the plank into a shark-infested sea in his days as a pirate. Oh, and it never would have happened if he hadn't saved that Prince and Princess from being cast adrift onto a desert island.
This story must have stuck, for it was only last week that one of the tiny partygoers, now, by coincidence, training to become a no win, no fee lawyer, facebooked me and asked me if it really was true that my dad had been some kind of pirate.
We were lucky that my father, in the face of medical opinion, trusted his instincts and sought the advice of a specialist. Had he not, there is a chance he might not be alive today to babysit his grandchildren. And where would their playground kudos be without that pirate story?
Some explaining to do
Though with their enquiring minds and gift for science I'm not sure it will be believed for much longer. As Kitty asked me yesterday, "Dad, How did grandfather manage to get back on the ship and tie-up all those pirates after he'd gouged all those sharks' eyes out. Didn't all that blood he'd lost from his leg make him faint?"
Looks like I'll soon have to be explaining the meaning of clinical negligence.
