A few years ago, my husband and I were on vacation. We explored all the beautiful beaches around the small community we were staying in. The first few days were amazing, but on the second to-last day, as I was stepping out of the van in a sandy parking lot, I twisted my right ankle. I immediately knew it was a serious injury because I felt something snap. We were in a pretty remote location that didn't have a major hospital, so we had to drive four hours to the nearest one. They took 17 x-rays on brand-new equipment. I was told that my tibia and fibula were both fractured, but I didn’t need emergency surgery, and would be better off seeing a provider back at home. They sent me home with digital copies of my x-rays on compact discs (CDs).
After returning home, I took my CDs to a specialist at a nearby health system that a friend recommended to me. They said I could meet with a surgeon on Monday. I didn’t think to ask for my CDs back from the specialist to take to the surgeon, because they were colleagues in the same health system. But when I got to my appointment at the surgeon's office, they said that they couldn’t access the images from the CD I gave the specialist because they didn’t know how to request them in their health system's new EHR system. Since I didn’t have my discs, I had to get more x-rays. This time, however, they took my x-rays on much older equipment.
Two days later, I was laying on the operating table and the professionals were going over their pre-op game plan. I heard the surgeon say he would be fixing the fibula, but he didn’t say anything about the broken tibia, so I asked him. He said only the fibula was broken. I explained to him that my original imaging indicated that both bones were broken. I even showed him pictures on my phone of the x-rays from the first hospital.
No longer addressing me, but the anesthesiologist, he said, “Why is she showing me this? I’m the surgeon. Someone get her to sleep.” When I woke up, I found out he hadn’t fixed my tibia.
Half a year later, I was still struggling with painful PT exercises and couldn’t get my balance like before. This went on for two more years, until I finally found another provider who did a CT, MRI, and eventually, a scope. He found a cyst, arthritis, and a poorly-healed and unstable tibial fracture. Worst of all, he said the original surgeon never reattached my ligament, which was why I’d been having so much pain and trouble balancing.
What did I learn from this story? While doctors do the best job they can, they are limited by the technology that they have available to them. We must be advocates for our own health. If I'd been able to use Clearpath instead, I would have been able to share my high-quality images with my local hospital's surgeon, and my surgery would have probably been effective, saving me years of pain and physical therapy that eventually ended in my having to have another surgery. Clearpath would have put me in the driver's seat of my own health.
