{"id":120,"date":"2009-11-02T14:26:55","date_gmt":"2009-11-02T18:26:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/96.30.24.48\/~ctcps\/?p=120"},"modified":"2013-01-22T18:12:35","modified_gmt":"2013-01-22T18:12:35","slug":"patient-safety-advocate-mike-morans-sermon-on-medical-negligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.ctcps.org\/?p=120","title":{"rendered":"Patient safety advocate, Mike Moran's sermon on medical negligence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reverand Mike Moran went to DC with the Center for Justice and Democracy<\/a> to talk to our Congressional delegation about medical negligence. Here is the sermon he wrote when he returned home.\u00a0 Mike, thank you.<\/p>\n

When I typed in this week\u2019s sermon title my spell checker kept telling me that felicitude was not a word.\u00a0 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 \u2013 it rhymes with gratitude.\u00a0\u00a0 I didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The reason I was out of town had very little to do with faith or felicitude.\u00a0 Some of you know that in 2004 my mother in law was permanently disabled by a medication overdose in the hospital.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

There were groups from all over the country, and each group went to meet their own Congressional delegation.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The stories ranged from terrible to tragic \u2013 we were a parade of sadness.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 His case involved criminal indictments and\u00a0 prosecution.\u00a0 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

What gives people the capacity to rebound from sadness to happiness, from hopelessness to optimism, from grief to joy?\u00a0 I don\u2019t think you can underestimate the role faith plays in these transformations.\u00a0 And of all the descriptions I\u2019ve read of this kind of sustaining faith, one of the clearest comes from someone who was famous, like Bartimaeus, for being blind.\u00a0 This is from The Open Door by Helen Keller.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

A simple, childlike faith in a Divine Friend solves all the problems that come to us by land or sea.\u00a0 Difficulties meet us at every turn.\u00a0 They are the accompaniment of life.\u00a0 They result from combinations of character and individual idiosyncrasies.\u00a0 The surest way to meet them is to assume that we are immortal and that we have a friend who \u201cslumbers not, nor sleeps,\u201d and who watches over us and guides \u2013 if we but let Him.\u00a0 With this thought strongly entrenched in our inmost being, we can do almost anything we wish and need not limit the things we think.\u00a0 We may help ourselves to all the beauty of the universe that we can hold.\u00a0 For every hurt there is recompense of tender sympathy.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The marvelous richness of human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were not limitations to overcome.\u00a0 The hilltop hour would not be half so wonderful if there was no dark valley to traverse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-patient-safety-activism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.ctcps.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.ctcps.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.ctcps.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.ctcps.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.ctcps.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=120"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.ctcps.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1398,"href":"https:\/\/blog.ctcps.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions\/1398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.ctcps.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.ctcps.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.ctcps.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}