Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [77]
Still, the hospitals where he worked soon started to notice his odd work habits. At San Jacinto Methodist, for example, he repeatedly canceled scheduled surgeries. He also failed to keep appointments with patients or keep accurate medical charts. Internal hospital memos from as early as 1983 show that the medical staff was worried that Scheffey’s erratic behavior might be the result of drug use. And he was not always the well-mannered and charming young doctor. In one nurse’s report from 1984, he was described as “very ugly and sarcastic toward me.” The nurse added that “his speech was very slurred and irrational.”
Even more disturbing, Scheffey came to be known as a surgeon whose patients lost a great deal of blood. “The losses were massive,” says Priscilla Walters, an attorney who has been involved in twenty lawsuits against Scheffey. “Sometimes almost all of the patient’s blood had to be replaced. The surgeries he was performing, in the hands of a competent surgeon, did not result in much blood loss—usually about one hundred cc’s, or three ounces. One of my clients lost four thousand cc’s [more than a gallon] during a back surgery.” Scheffey so often emerged from the operating room covered with blood that he earned a nickname: Eric the Red.
Scheffey was woefully ignorant of one of the most important areas of surgery: hemostasis, or the control of bleeding. In depositions from lawsuits, two of Scheffey’s former colleagues said that since he did not know how to use conventional techniques to control bleeding, Scheffey resorted to primitive ones, notably the wildly liberal use of bone wax and Gelfoam sponges. Bone wax is a substance used to stop bone from bleeding. Gelfoam sponges are soaked in a coagulant called thrombin and are used to stop general bleeding. Most surgeons require less than one tube of bone wax during an operation. Scheffey often used ten. In a single operation, most surgeons might use one or two five-by-seven-inch Gelfoam sponges. Scheffey once used seventeen. “Since he did not know how to control bleeding, he used bone wax like Bondo,” says Hartley Hampton, a Houston attorney who has represented more than a dozen of Scheffey’s former patients. The application of bone wax in those quantities, according to a 1992 deposition from Dr. Baltazar Benavides, who had assisted in many of Scheffey’s operations, can create a breeding ground for bacteria that cause the sorts of infections that plagued so many of Scheffey’s patients.
Tywater’s death was thus a logical outcome of Scheffey’s incompetence. But it was also related to another of the doctor’s personal quirks. On the day after Memorial Day, a security guard at Montgomery Ward found Scheffey in green surgical scrubs, with shoe covers, a cap, and a lab coat crammed with hundred-dollar bills and reported that he was “pacing real fast, swearing and cussing, pulling things off the shelves.” Trailed by the security guard, Scheffey then went to the cash register and put eight toy dolls, four hundred-dollar bills, and his car keys on the counter and walked out of the store. Scheffey, as it turned out, was out of his mind on cocaine. Police later found thirty grams of the drug—about $3,000 worth—in his Jaguar. He was arrested, pled guilty to criminal possession of cocaine, and received a ten-year probation and a $2,000 fine. The state medical board restricted his license and put him on its own ten-year probation, which included drug tests, counseling, and the requirement that he be monitored by other doctors. Shortly after the incident, Scheffey checked himself into a California drug rehabilitation center.
The story, in all of its lurid detail, made the newspapers in Baytown and Houston. Though reporters never drew a direct connection between Scheffey