A Husband’s Labors

The last delivery I had to do in residency involved a 19-year-old mother, who was so muscular and developed I thought she must have recently been an athlete, and appeared to be in much better shape than the average late-term patient.  This was her FIRST delivery, a point I can’t overstress.  She was not my regular patient, but I was on-call, the mercifully last shift of my last OB month in family practice residency.  The L&D nurses, cliquish and condescending as is the norm in big hospitals, were nonetheless excellent – also the norm – and had all well in hand, allowing me to wander through the periphery and mindlessly stare at the TV until it was go time.  Station lowering, cervix dilating fully, I got the call, got all gowned, gloved, and masked, and was seated appropriately, examining the not yet crowning head, blue towel in place to support the perineum, turning to the side to check my instrument tray, turning back, and BLOOPSWISSSSSHHHHHTHUMP, the baby fired out of the birth canal and hit me in the gut.  

Regular readers might think that my style occasionally seems overheated, rarely borderline embellished … no.  The entire baby literally flew out and hit me in the gut just as I had turned back toward the mother, causing me to instinctively bend forward like a receiver at the goal line for an underthrown ball, my hands flailing for a desperate half-second at the slime before somehow, mercifully getting under the kid, sparing him injury and me feeling for all time like the biggest jerk ever for dropping a baby.  That whole moment took five years off my life.  I never liked anything about OB, and this was a perfect sendoff.  Ironically, when the delights of primary care ran me off forever to the ER, I would again have to deal with emergent births, and I pride myself at transferring them to a facility with OB – if not in active labor, thank you very much EMTALA, you bastards – faster than anyone I know.  I’d rather have combative drunks in every room.

It caught my eye that a man in Australia recently sued over complications arising from his wife’s C-section in 2018.  Anil Koppula filed the lawsuit several years after the successful operation, declaring that the experience led to a “breakdown of his marriage.”  So traumatized was he allegedly by the site of his wife’s chitlins exposed to the air that he developed a “psychotic illness.”  

“Mr. Koppula alleges that he was encouraged, or permitted, to observe the delivery, that in the course of doing so, he saw his wife’s internal organs and blood.”

Additionally, Koppula claims ‘that the Hospital breached a duty of care it owed to him and is liable to pay him damages.’”  

But had the hospital DIScouraged the husband from watching, could he not likewise have squalled about a breach of duty of care?  (As an aside, this demonstrates what I have written here repeatedly, that our legal system has made the relationship with patients oppositional rather than collaborative, and every patient, and every family member is a potential opponent.)

Did the allegedly injured suffer flashbacks, panic attacks, was he no longer able to eat certain foods, was there a loss of consortium?  Was he just a bad husband angry that he had to get up in the middle of the night, or was there already a post-delivery rift with his wife already in the offing?  We’ll never know, but his demand of the equivalent of $642 million U.S. in compensation certainly seems excessive.  Nowhere is there any mention of harm to the actual patients, so this guy’s claims of damage are, charitably, unsympathetic.  The Australian judge certainly thought so, dismissing this suit and calling it an “abuse of process.”  

Another source muses that “If the court were to have found the hospital liable, it could establish a precedent that extends the duty of care beyond patients to cover family members present during medical procedures. Such an outcome would have far-reaching consequences for healthcare providers and potentially reshape the way they approach consent from witnesses. Additionally, the case could influence the development of mental health legislation and heighten awareness around the psychological impact of medical events on non-patients.”

Oh, how our homegrown piranhas would love that.  More potential plaintiffs mean more settlements, more TV ads, more billboards in low-income neighborhoods, and keep the cycle going forever.  Those beach houses just don’t build themselves.

A society that accelerates absurd litigiousness to the point where it is the expected norm, is one that has already rejected stoicism and the acceptance of risk as a natural part of life.  It is also one that not coincidentally has come to reject rather than celebrate masculine norms.  The long-ago stereotype of the nervous father sweating out labor in the corner bar across the street was both pleasant and rational.  Had modern society held on to such evolved sensibilities, we wouldn’t have male wimps like this needlessly crowding delivery rooms, and later, lawyer’s offices.

(Author’s Note: This entry is coincident with my annual ritual of paying off state-sanctioned extortion.  Every October, I have to mail off $250 to the Florida Birth-Related Neurological Compensation Association.  This parasitic organization has a nice website that boasts “Care and Support for Florida’s Families.”  It was created because contemptible malpractice lawyers had driven up costs so much that a risk-sharing pool was created to take “those costly cases out of the tort system, which helped to stabilize Florida’s medical malpractice insurance market and encouraged Florida’s obstetricians to continue delivering babies.”  This is a yearly protection fee, required as a condition of licensure, and the implication is nonetheless that there must have been some fault, but certainly not on the part of the meth-using pre-term multiparous carrier.)