A Drop of Citrus

You see, the plaintiff went to this specific doctor for hip replacement surgery. Now, of course, you have to get a premise for exactly how hip surgery goes and all the variables that go into it. To sum it up, when the doctor put the rod into her leg to connect to the joint, he put one that sat up slightly high, about 2 cm. In a normal hip replacement, the rod is level with the top of the femur, like the picture below:

You see the dark gray part? That's the rod we're talking about. In this case, the rod sat about 2 cm higher than the top of the femur, if you can imagine that. Now, 2 cm isn't high at all. Most people have a leg discrepency of about 1 cm and those who have one greater than that either don't know it, or know it and use a heel lift. Anyway, when the doctor performed the surgery, that's what he did. There are all different sizes of rods for obvious reasons. The reason the doctor kept the 2 cm difference (which was a size 3) was because if he had gone for a smaller size (which was a size 2) it would have been too low and had a slight rotation, and could've caused even more damages to the patient. He also compensated for the leg lengthening by shortening the head of the rod so that the lengenthing was hardly noticeable.

Anyway, the patient went home and recovered fine, but only noticed her leg was longer when a friend pointed it out to her. She went back in for a checkup about 10 days later and told the doctor, he checked again and noticed that the bone hadn't grown around it like he had planned and all that junk. He gave her options of either using a heel lift (she was limping somewhat because of the lengthening) or she could have the surgery redone. He advised her that if she wanted the surgery again, though, that she would have to do it immediately or else it would be harder for her to heal quickly. Well, a couple weeks passed and she decided to get the surgery redone. The second was a success, all he had to do was make another cut in the femur, put a smaller rod in (the size 2) which now had a snug fit without any rotation.

What the plaintiff was trying to prove was that he was negligent in the first surgery by not leaving in the size 2, even though it didn't fit properly either, and caused her the pain and suffereing of having to go through the operation again. The reason we didn't see that was because he was very careful about compensating for the extra length. He didn't want the rod to be too loose or she could've easily broken her femur or had a dislocation, so he went with the larger, more secure fitting one which had a slight difference in height, then compensated from there.

I ask you, would any negligent doctor do that? I think he used his best judgement under the circumstances and was very careful in making his decisions. Needless to say, we all agreed he wasn't negligent or to blame for her pain (which she had none anyway after both surgeries) and he went free!

So, it was a cool experience, but still annoying because of the fact I had to miss work for it. *sigh* That's the price you pay for living in the U.S. I guess.

ALL RIGHT. I'm sure I've bored you enough so I'll stop talking now!

<3