Broken People Don’t Break the System. Broken Systems Break the People

“America, The Never Event,” an excerpt from The Fleeing Season by Jamie D Brooks

“We needed to move quickly because of the severe pelvic fracture and damage to the left kidney. It was the bleed, we had to stop the bleed. . . . Somehow, the repair to the kidney didn’t, wasn’t somehow, we . . . I . . . it was the wrong side—the wrong kidney we were trying to work on.”

I am no doctor, but I could tell that the physician’s voice was stripped raw, the way voices sandpapered by anguish often are. I understood that his 20-plus years practicing as an orthopedic trauma surgeon could weather his soul, but I detected much more than the strain of accumulated sorrow in Dr Gordon’s voice coming through my phone. Before I could ask my follow-up questions—there ...