Medical tragedies, system failings and parental grief

New York Times columnist Jim Dwyer wrote a heartbreaking story this week about the death of a boy named Rory Staunton, who died of sepsis.

It would be impossibly unfair for anyone to do a post-mortem based solely on a newspaper account of this tragedy, and even less fair if it were to be done by someone like me with an English degree and no medical training.

What's far more unfair, though, is to have a bright, curious, apple-cheeked 12-year-old diving for a basketball at school one day and just four days later find him stretched out dead at the morgue.

It is a cosmic unfairness, and it applies equally to the bright and pretty 24-year-old graduate student Aimee Copeland, who lost her hands, a leg and a foot to a runaway infection in May.

In both of these cases, when the post-mortems are completed, it's safe for even a layman like me to predict the explanations why these tragedies occurred. They will include time constraints on their treating physicians, pressures exacerbated by our fee-for-service healthcare payment model, the rarity of their infections compared with the confounding commonness of their wounds and the lack—or inadequacy—of readily available decision and diagnostic support systems.

As a father of a son and a daughter, I am fully qualified to predict those reasons won't be good enough for the Staunton and the Copeland parents.

And, of course, they shouldn't be.

Follow Joseph Conn on Twitter: @MHJConn.