Even as a resident, I knew the story of James Gain. Dr. Gain was a doctor at Haven Port Hospital for over thirty years, working specifically in the pharmaceuticals department. He was beloved by his patients, nurses, doctors, management, the janitors, even people who came by only once to pick up a single prescription. Winter of 2012, Dr. Gain was fired after giving the wrong medication to a nine-year-old boy with a heart-defect, Edward Richardson. Edward died in his house a week or two after the medication was given to him. The Richardson family was extremely wealthy, and threatened to close the entirety of the hospital, and serve every single person in the hospital who had even interacted with Edward a lawsuit. Management knew they were going to be sued into oblivion anyway, so to soften the blow they ended up firing Dr. Gain.
On the day of February 5th, Dr. Gain was given the notice of his firing, and, while you’re not supposed to use the word “insane” in our hospital, Dr. Gain literally went insane. He took a scalpel, went down to the ED, and stabbed three patients and a nurse. Two of the patients survived, while eighty-seven-year-old Marta Sanders, a woman who had taken a tumble down her stairs, and Nurse Jacobs, a man with a wedding in less than five days, tragically passed away. Before security was able to stop Dr. Gain, Dr. Gain took his own life by shoving the scalpel he had just used to kill two people on himself, jamming it into his neck.
The story made mainstream news, about the horrible tragedy that had happened at Haven Port Hospital, yet the story seemed to disappear after a few days. Life was expected to go back to normal, people were supposed to go back into the ED without the vision of Nurse Jacobs blood on the walls, Marta Sanders body fallen out of her bed, and the silver scalpel sticking out of Dr. Gain’s neck.
They say on the anniversary of Dr. Gain’s death, something always goes horribly wrong in a single department. Last year, the radiology department left a metal tray table inside the MRI room. Once the machine was turned on, the table rammed itself into the machine from the magnets and put a patient into a permanent coma. The year before that, psychology had a patient suffering from anorexia randomly, and suddenly grabbed a chair and threw it at a doctor, and then jumped out of their rooms window, plummeting to their death. Nothing ever good happens on December 29th. Most people try to skip that day, pass their shift off to an unsuspecting intern, or resident.
I got stuck with the shift on February 5th. The ten-year anniversary of Dr. Gain’s death. Something bad was going to happen, everyone in that hospital knew it. I won’t lie, even I tried passing off my shift to other people, but I had no luck. I parked my car in front of the hospital that day, got out of it, and genuinely contemplated not going in at all, and just faking sick. I’m not that superstitious, I swear, but I did not want to go in. But I still did.
At 8:00 AM, a light fell in the OR, falling directly on a patient having open heart surgery, as well as one of the surgeons involved, knocking him out, and killing the patient.
At 9:00 AM, a printer in the finance department explodes, and gives one of the employees a third degree burn to her face, as well as injuring a few others.
At 11:00 AM, the long-term care center was hit with four different patients going into cardiac arrest at the exact same time. All four elderly patients died.
At 12:00 PM, a car rammed into the front doors of the hospitals waiting room, luckily it missed all of the chairs full of waiting patients, but it still hit the secretary head on, the driver was thrown from his seat through the windshield, into the brick wall directly in front of him. Both died a few hours later.
At 2:00 PM, a heater in the pediatrics department set fire to a curtain nearby, and then a wall, and then multiple patient rooms. Five kids, four parents, and two doctors were stuck inside those rooms. Three kids, two parents, and one doctor walked out.
At 5:00 PM, the skyway connecting the hospital partially collapses, injuring seven, and killing two who were on the skywalk. Underneath the skywalk is the hospitals parking lot, the skyway crushed three people inside of an SUV below, killing all three.
At that point, the hospital directed all calls out of the hospital, we just couldn’t take anymore. Only a few departments stayed open, including pharmaceuticals.
At 7:00 PM, two lab assistants, and the head of epidemiology are exposed to a life-threatening disease when a vial falls to the floor and breaks. They’re still in quarantine, one of them in critical condition.
My shift always ends at 9:00, and the time was 8:45. I’d been giving out drugs and medication all day, hearing about the disasters unfold in the hospital, one, and then another, and then another. I’d had enough that day. After the first two incidents, the pharmacy closed to only patients who needed necessary medications, ones that couldn’t even survive a day without their meds. Surprisingly, that was around forty eight people.
When it comes to the most necessary of drugs, people reserve times for when they want to pick theirs up. I’m an extremely organized person. I line up the medication in a perfect line, based on the time people come in to pick their medication up at, so I can just grab the closest one, give it to the person, and go on with my day. I was rushing back and forth between pharmaceuticals and the ED all day, helping the nurses and doctors there with the mass amounts of patients that had came in, and quickly delivering people their medications.
Nearing the end of the day, I was able to finally just relax, and sit down. Out of the forty-eight bottles that used to sit on the counter, only one remained now. A man then entered the pharmacy, requesting his normal medication. I walked up to the counter, grabbed the orange pill bottle, and threw it to the man. He caught the catch, and waved as he left the pharmacy. Before he could make it to the exit, however, he turned back, and placed the bottle on the counter.
“Hey, this isn’t my prescription. I can’t even read whatever the hell this is.”
He passed the bottle to me, and I read the label, “Acetaminophen-hydrocodone”
“I need warfarin, not whatever the hell this stuff is. C’mon man, I could’ve died.”
I looked to my left at the counter. I was out of pill bottles. I couldn’t have made a mistake, though, I knew exactly where I placed those bottles. I knew the exact position they were in, the order they were in, I knew almost everything you needed to know about those bottles.
It wasn’t my fault.
It wasn’t my fault they got the wrong medication.
It wasn’t my fault.
They should have checked the name on the medication.
It wasn’t my fault.
They should have been more careful.
It wasn’t my fault.
It was Dr. Gain.
It wasn’t my fault.
It had to be Dr. Gain.
It wasn’t my fault they all died.
Is this what Dr. Gain felt?
It wasn’t my fault every single one of them got the wrong medication.
I’m outside the ED with a scalpel right now as I post this.
The reason I posted this, though, is that I have a question.
Was it my fault?