I finished working on a letter to send to the neurologist who failed me. It was a difficult one to write as I wanted to say things like:

I received excellent clinical training in speech-language pathology at Purdue University with an internship at a large VA hospital in Indianapolis, in addition to training in the department of Neurology during my clinical fellowship at Marshfield Clinic. I trained students as well as a member of Clinical Faculty at UBC. There were so many errors and omissions in your reports that I would have failed you if you had been one of my students.

I had to try to let go of my anger and manage my own ego a bit. As much as I wanted to put that paragraph in the letter. I had to re-focus on the purpose of the letter.

So I wrote a better letter and I finished it off by saying:

My hope is that you will order quick MRIs for all your future facial pain patients and to look at them, review them and discuss them with your colleagues and associates to help prevent the degree of pain, suffering, neglect and abuse that I experienced.

And I dropped it off in person at his office at VGH two days ago.

The main reason I want to do this is to help prevent this from happening again to somebody else. Although I may be 1 in a million, if he had done his job, I would have at least been diagnosed earlier. There will be no apology (although one is certainly warranted) but I hope that all future patients of his — and the residents/interns he trains — will benefit from my suffering.

In hindsight, maybe I should have said ‘no’ when he handed me over to the resident to assess . Maybe he would have had a better sense of the history because the assessment report was abysmal. And I naively thought I’d get the time to help correct it but it never got any better.

And the resident will never get the chance to learn that he assessed somebody with MS and missed it too. I wonder if the information about my right upper lip numbness might have provided a clue to the neurologist as it didn’t make it into the report, although it states there was no evidence of trigeminal sensory loss. I guess the kleenex on the face is supposed to be more reliable than my subjective self-report.