Back in Buenos Aires with Vero´s cuffin.The burial :Jardin de Paz cemetery

PART II.Veronica´s burial.Jardin de Paz Cemetery

Back in Argentina ,We buried Veronica (I will avoid details related with the transportation of the body to my country and the burial ceremony crowded by friends and family ).Thereafter,back in LA, somebody ,an acquaitance,introduced us with a lawyer who pictured himself as well specialized in wrongful deaths and medical malpractice. As the introduction came from an acquaitance we felt confident of his expertise,so we hired him. That stupid,layer and incompetent (ambulance chaser )lawyer from Beverly Hills with a white Mercedes 500 ,wasted our time during six months ,hardly tried to discourage us telling that there was no case. Nowadays I strongly believe that meanwhile discouraging us ,he was negotiating with the insurer and with the hospital counselors. He showed us reports signed by other lawyers supposedly experts in malpractice ,to support his alleged "lack of case ". He was not an expert,of course. At the same time I consulted forensic experts in Argentina. All of them were coincident to agree in one definition: we were facing a clear case of medical malpractice by negligence and ignorance of the physicians who taked care of my child.They pointed in a clear cut that said ignorance made that clear symptoms of preclampsia thereafter progressing to eclampsia where ignored by doctors and nurses so no treatement or even standard management has been performed timely to stop the develope of said disease which ended in a HELLP. They simply let my daughter to die stupidiy,foolishly,criminally.Should my daughter been in accurate hands of skilled professionals should she be alive.No doubt. So at last,that ambulance chaser declined to attend our case letting us alones without legal advice. I restarted reeching a lawyer in the area of Los Angeles and vicinity although my cousins are mostly lawyers but one is in Washington,another in NYC and another in San Francisco. At last the director of Tarbut School,a jewish school in Buenos Aires,counseled me to visit the Rabbi of Tarbut Bet Thora,a school in Santa Ana. He gave me a list of six specialized lawyers in the area pointing expressly one Law Office, Aitken,Aitken & Cohn from Santa Ana,Cal. So I went there and as soon as they took a look over the whole documentation submitted by me the immediately arrived to the same conclusion of our forensic experts. That was a clear case of wrongful death by gross medical negligence and ignorance. They agreed to represent and counsel us to litigate against wrongdoers. Meanwhile I personnaly submitted complaints against Geronimo Rodriguez MD , Joseph Li MD and Michael Gurevitch MD from Pasadena ,before the Medical Board of California headquarters in Sacramento.At the same time I complained against involved nurses before the Registered Nursing Board and against the Hospital before the Public Health Service in LA(Commerce headquarters)

Our lawyer,Richard Cohn obtained reports from experts outside Los Angeles or Pasadena area. It is more than common that no one expert will state against a peer in the same area. That is what I call "physicians brotherhood" and I can say so because I suffered said brotherhood. Some months after a settlement was signed amid a mediation hearing and the hospital and doctors representatives agreed to pay to my granddaughter Indiana something more than two caps of MICRA,the unfair bill that California Legislature (under the pressure of AMA and Insurance lobbysts ) enacted in 1975 to compensate cases of wrongful deaths.Said caps ($ 250.000 of 1975 )are unable to be actualized by inflation. Being actualized they should be about 1 million. Our counselors convinced us that going to a jury trial was a risk because the Hospital was influencial in the area and the jury could be reluctant to condemn the hospital or doctors specially having into account that although my grandchild was american my daughter wasn`t american citizen. Nevertheless my objective,my committment was only get some justice from authorities ,justice represented by anything else than disciplination measures against involved doctors and nurses.

I went several times along the last three years to Sacramento and to Diamond Bar (Field office of the Medical Board ) where I submitted reports of experts,copies of records,documentation etcetera. It seemed that the facts were so clear that the Board reviewers and enforcement chiefs had no way to elude disciplinate wrongdoers.

But, after almost three years (our experts submitted their reports in no more than six months ) ,The Board, breaking even the Medical Practice Act´s rules, submitted a last report telling us that....well, Sir... it was just a Single Departure from standards and the unique fault of Dr Gerónimo Rodriguez has been just :...not having ordered an urine analysis !! The statement was so cynical that we felt astonished as well as our six renowned experts (two of them counselor before the Board ). so I took the first flight to Sacramento.............(To be continued )