Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

screen and pointed to a shadowy area in the middle of the image. He looked around at the class, then focused on Swango. “Mike, tell us what’s in this picture,” he said. Swango was silent. Finally he said, “I don’t know.” There were some titters from other students. “That’s the heart, Mike,” Folce said, sarcastically emphasizing the word “heart.” It was almost as big a debacle as the cadaver incident, for any medical student this close to getting his degree should have been able to recognize the heart on an X ray. It was so obvious that his classmates concluded that Swango must simply have panicked and frozen.
    Yet the episode was one of many that led some of his classmates to conclude that Swango was taking a surprisingly cavalier approach not only to medical school, but to the well-being of his patients. One of the first clinical assignments medical students receive is to take histories and perform physicals—“H & P’s”—on hospital patients. Students interview patients, record their medical histories, undertake routine physical examinations, and post the results on the patients’ charts. Depending on the patient, the procedurecan take anywhere from a half-hour to ninety minutes. His classmates observed that Swango was completing his entire rounds in less than an hour, sometimes spending what seemed like as little as five minutes with a patient. Yet he filed complete H & P’s. In at least one instance, another student charged that Swango had plagiarized or fabricated his entire write-up. The claim triggered renewed talk and concern about Swango among his classmates; Rosenthal and several others even wondered whether Swango should be reported to the Student Progress Committee, a group of twelve faculty and two students that heard complaints of student misconduct. But no one did so.
    Within their third-year rotations, students can choose areas of specialization. There was a standing joke at SIU that the dumb and the lazy chose anesthesia; the smart and the lazy went into radiology; the dumb hard workers chose pediatrics; and the smart hard workers went into neurosurgery. Thus, it came as a surprise to many when Swango concentrated his courses in neurosurgery, especially considering the cadaver incident. Neurosurgery, involving delicate operations on the brain and other parts of the nervous system, is one of medicine’s most demanding (and highly paid) specialties. It is emotionally taxing, because patients needing neurosurgery are often in dire straits, and because deaths and catastrophic incidents on the operating table are probably more common than in any other area of practice. Still, competition for internships and residencies is intense. But Swango was no more forthcoming to his classmates about his choice of a specialty than he had been about why he had chosen medicine as a career.
    Swango’s decision came as a particular shock to his classmate Sweeney, who had been so dismayed by the cadaver incident and thought Swango was ill-equipped to practice medicine at all, much less neurosurgery. Furthermore, neurosurgery happened to be Sweeney’s area of concentration as well, so he and Swango would share patients and work closely together.
    The two were jointly assigned to a resident, Mark Zawodniak, who would oversee their work and act as a mentor. Though that meant Sweeney and Swango had to see each other virtually every day, they avoided each other as much as possible. Though most students sharing a neurosurgery specialty would observe each other’ssurgeries, Sweeney stayed away from Swango’s—he was horrified by the prospect of what he might see—and Swango never showed up at Sweeney’s, either.
    Zawodniak, though he was genial and friendly, also developed an aversion to Swango. When Swango was out of earshot after one particularly frustrating encounter, Zawodniak turned to Sweeney and lamented, “What did I fucking do to deserve him?”
    But finally, in the person of a faculty