Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [78]
His promising career quickly unraveled. Scheffey lost his hospital privileges at the three Baytown hospitals. The number of medical malpractice suits against him (including one from Tywater’s husband) was steadily rising, from one in 1982 to thirteen in 1986. By that same year he had, for the third time, flunked a test that would have made him a board-certified orthopedic surgeon. Meanwhile, word had spread in the tight-knit medical community that he was an inept surgeon who performed unnecessary surgeries. At the age of thirty-six, he was a professional pariah. His career should have been over.
UNTIL THE EARLY 2000S, doctors in Texas were rarely removed for lack of medical competence by the Texas State Board of Medical Examiners. They were frequently reprimanded and probated, as Scheffey was, for substance abuse. They could lose their licenses for committing crimes (though at one point the state had nineteen felons practicing medicine). But they almost never had their licenses suspended or revoked for what is known in the industry as a “standard of care” violation. In fact, a doctor could be sued, as Scheffey was, dozens of times, and be the subject, as Scheffey also was, of wave after wave of complaints and still keep his license.
Which is exactly what Scheffey did. Only six months after his spectacular downfall, he even managed to find a hospital that would let him operate: a small facility in inner-city Houston called Medical Arts Hospital. Scheffey went to work there in November 1985, embarking on what would become the most productive, lucrative, and destructive phase of his long career. He was now cocaine free; his condition was monitored by frequent urine tests ordered by the state medical board. Whether this was good or bad news for his patients was debatable. A drug-free Scheffey quickly turned into a workaholic Scheffey. Almost immediately, he became the hospital’s main revenue producer, accounting for more than half of the patients at the hospital. His new private clinic in Channelview was soon jammed with people waiting for appointments. By the end of the decade, as many as ninety people a day would pass through his office.
A good example from that era was William McDuell, a Houston truck driver who came to Scheffey with a broken wrist. Scheffey operated on McDuell at Doctors Hospital-Airline, in Houston (where he received privileges in 1986), set the wrist, and had it put in a cast. Soon afterward, according to McDuell, his wrist “split open” from an infection. Scheffey operated again to fix the wrist and then somehow persuaded McDuell, who had merely mentioned to Scheffey that his leg had once locked up, to undergo back surgery in order to fix his leg. Scheffey performed the operation, after which McDuell was forced to stay in the hospital, in pain, for two weeks. Ten months later, McDuell was still in pain, and Scheffey operated again. This time McDuell’s back went numb, and he could neither get out of bed by himself nor walk without falling. Scheffey operated a third time on his back, after which McDuell found that he could not swallow. A fourth surgery left him in constant pain, and he had been unable to sleep well since his ordeal had begun. When Scheffey then told him that he needed a fifth surgery, he consulted another doctor. (McDuell later sued, and Scheffey settled out of court.)
Why would Scheffey operate five times—or fifteen times in another case—when it probably wasn’t necessary? As far as anyone can tell, the answer was, very simply, money. He propped up his lavish lifestyle by performing anywhere between 250