Bloody Head, Revisited

Here’s the lede of a Newsday story I found on Drudge:

At least 99 people have contracted salmonella at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, and the source of the intestinal illness remains a mystery.

Now that I enjoy full libel protection (see previous post), let me tell you why this story doesn’t surpise me. At the age of five, I was admitted to St. Louis Children’s with ITP. It’s a rare — and in children, usually temporary — blood disorder. Something, no one knows what, runs around the sufferer’s system, eating up all the red blood platelets.

You know, those nifty little things that make your blood clot.

I recovered fully, as most kids do, within a couple of weeks — but with little thanks due to the hospital.

For three days I was stuck there, getting stuck with needles every few hours. The only way (at least then) to diagnose ITP was to rule out everything else. They even had to rule out leukemia, which meant taking a bone marrow sample — a story I can’t tell until after a second martini.

While under the watchful eye of the good people of SLCH, a door slammed into my foot, causing me to lose a big toenail, and then there was the wagon ride accident requiring three stitches to my skull.

Yeah — the kid who should have been treated like a hemophiliac was allowed to run so wild that he suffered two so-so serious bleeding injuries in less than three days.

You’d think they’d have upped their standards since then.