Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [149]
It takes courage to leave our past selves behind. But it takes even more to carry some token of them with us as we go: to accept that we have erred, recognize that we have changed, remember with compassion our caterpillar past. As difficult as this can be, the dividends are worth it. “The main interest in life and work,” said Foucault, “is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.” Such transformations don’t only come about through wrongness, of course—but wrongness is always an opportunity for such transformations. Recall what I said earlier: if we could freeze the frame on each of our mistakes, what we would see in the center every time would be change.
The scale of that change varies widely, but in the end it knows no limits. Our errors can alter our beliefs, our relationships, ourselves. In a sense, they can even change our whole world. We can find ourselves living—uncomfortably, frighteningly, thrillingly—in a place where we can experience things we could never have experienced before. “They say the older you get, the harder it is for you to change,” C. P. Ellis said. “That’s not necessarily true. Since I changed, I’ve set down and listened to tapes of Martin Luther King. I listen to it and tears come to my eyes, ’cause I know what he’s sayin’ now. I know what’s happenin’.”
PART IV
EMBRACING ERROR
14.
The Paradox of Error
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
—WALLACE STEVENS,
“13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD”
One day in the summer of 2008, just before the July Fourth holidays, a patient was wheeled into an operating room at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. BIDMC is one of the top medical institutions in the nation, and a teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School. Its staff sees some quarter of a million people every year and performs almost 175 surgeries each week. This particular one unfolded much as most surgeries do. The patient was anesthetized, the area to be operated on was prepped, and the initial incision was made. When the surgeon had completed his work, the patient was wheeled into a recovery room, still unconscious. When she awoke, she looked down at herself, looked up at her doctor, and asked why the wrong side of her body was in bandages.
Much of this book has been devoted to bringing to light the good side of error: the lessons we can learn from it, the ways it can change us, its connection to our intelligence, imagination, and humanity. But there is no good side to medical error. If, like this patient, you someday wake up in a hospital to discover that a surgeon has operated on the wrong part of your body, you will not pause to reflect on all the ways you can learn and grow through error. You will not feel curiosity or openness, and you will not feel gratitude—unless it is gratitude for having survived. According to the Institute of Medicine, between 690,000 and 748,000 patients are affected by medical errors in the United States every year, and between 44,000 and 98,000 die from them. Even the lowball estimate makes medical mistakes the eighth leading cause of death in the nation—worse than breast cancer, AIDS, and motor vehicle accidents. It also makes medicine far more error prone, and more dangerously so, than most other high-risk fields. For commercial aviation to take the same toll in the United States as medical errors do, a sold-out 747 would have to crash every three days, killing