Hiatt's mistake was an unnecessary tragedy. But what happened next was an unnecessary tragedy, too: Seven months after the error, Hiatt killed herself.
"She fell apart," her mother, Sharon Crum, says. "I suppose it would be the same thing you felt, if you felt at fault for a child's death."
This is a story about Hiatt, the mistake she made, how she struggled with that tragedy, and how the institutions that had previously supported her ultimately shut her out.
It is also a story about an open secret in American medicine. Medical errors kill more people each year than plane crashes, terrorist attacks, and drug overdoses combined. And there's collateral damage that often goes unnoticed: Every day, our healers quietly live with those they have wounded or even killed. Their ghosts creep into exam rooms, their cries haunt dreams, and seeing new patients can reopen old wounds.
"Every practicing physician has either made an error that harmed a patient or certainly been involved in the care of a patient who has been harmed," says Albert Wu, who directs the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Services and Outcome Research.
A new line of research that Wu began in the 1990s has found that many health care providers experience anguish, turmoil, and emotional trauma in the wake of a serious medical error. The providers are, in Wu's view, "second victims" of the mistake.
Just like their patients, these providers struggle to make sense of how an effort to heal turned into serious harm. One 2009 study found that two-thirds of providers reported "extreme sadness" and "difficulty concentrating" in the wake of harming a patient. More than half experienced depression; one-third said they avoided caring for similar patients afterward, for fear of making a similar mistake. Some consider suicide — and a smaller fraction, like Hiatt, take their own lives.