A coda in the key of snafu

Today I went and collected copies of my medical records from the doctor and hospital who perpetrated this mess.

Would you believe: the doctor misplaced a decimal point (yes, I have triple-checked the units) and went on to overstate my left-side pathology by a factor of TEN?  Instead of 60.4, the left adrenal cortisol was shown in the original labs as" > 604.0" and so the measured A/C ratio for the left adrenal vein was < 9.6 instead of the previously stated 96.  The right side, of course, remains as flawed and unusable as ever.

Furthermore, there was an annotation that the 6 ml sample had been exhausted without establishing a true cortisol level.  That is because the method of measurement user ever-increasing dilutions of sample fractions to establish a range within which a precise measurement can be made.  The doctors overshot my ACTH stimulation, resulting in aldosterone and cortisol too elevated to establish a true level of both using the 6 ml sample they drew.  The cortisol could just as easily be 1200 or 1800 or 2400 or literally any value greater than 604.  There is simply no way to distinguish from the lab results.

In other words, BOTH sides of the test were a failure.  The recognized failure on the right side protected me from proceeding based on the unrecognized failure on the left side.

No wonder, then, that the endocrinologist fled in apparent panic when he coincidentally happened to see me at the far end of a corridor outside his office.  I was far too forgiving earlier, when I mentally gave a pass for the misspelling of "vein" in my report from this $15,000 procedure.  In fact, that proved to be symptomatic of a generalized problem of sloppiness even in the details that mattered most.  Both of the doctors involved in this snafu had multiple opportunities to notice and correct the report, particularly when I inquired at one point specifically about any possible mistranscriptions.  Yet neither did so.  This is dangerous incompetence and complacency at one of Atlanta's supposedly best hospitals, frequently named as the choice of Atlanta's business and athletic elite.  Not only did they make this shocking error, they even failed to notice it.

I just shudder again and again to think that I might have elected surgery with (judging from statistics on left adrenal A/C ratios) well under a 50% probability of curing me, based on the multiple screw-ups in my case.  According to the latest research, even in the best of circumstances the cure rate after adrenalectomy is about 38% and the improvement rate tops out at 60%.