I am 79 now and not a spring chicken. About 20 years ago my friend Eddie Washburn from a wealthy old Rutherford County family told me about paying cash to participate in a group colonoscopy in Charlotte by Charlotte Gastro. I was immediately interested because my father had just been diagnosed with polyps which had begun to turn to cancer cells. My Uncle Raymond, his brother, had recently died of colon cancer.
My father’s polyps had just been removed before they began to spread cancer to other parts of his body. That’s what they told him. I saw photos of the darkened, diseased polyps; but at the time it had not occurred to me that these may have been stock photos. It occurs to me now.
After some finagling I got myself triaged into a group of Charlotte Gastro colonoscopies, and I watched on the screen as mine was performed by this cordial gastroenterologist with whom I was later to have several more warm conversations. In a few days I got a nice letter here in Asheville from the gastro doctor verifying what I already knew as an eyeball witness: I had no polyps.
I had noticed after the procedure at a Charlotte hospital that there were 8 to 10 men in recovery with me, and most of them had been rolled into the room in stretchers or gurnies as I watched. They were knocked out cold– unconscious. I was the only patient who was conscious and had been conscious all the time through my fascinating colonoscopy. While all these men were beginning to fart in concert, I pulled my hips apart so I could let the air pumped to balloon my colon escape without noise. After a while these men started waking up from the anesthesia; but I had never been asleep, something about me that has always been peculiar. It has happened previous to that occasion and afterwards, as you will see.
One more observation: You can endure a colonoscopy without anesthesia which I did in Greenville, SC in the early nineties when Bill Clinton was in office and the Republican doctor had made crude jokes about Chelsea Clinton. It had been my first and was uncomfortable but not enough to make me howl, or even squirm. It was the laxatives that had irritated me, not the invasion of my colon.
OK, back to my experience with Charlotte Gastro. A week or so after I got my letter of happy relief from the gastroenterologist, I received an alarming statement from a pathology laboratory in South Carolina demanding a whopping cash payment from me for “polyp biopsy and analysis of abnormal cells.”
I immediately began calling their phones and after some of the people I talked to dismissed me like I was a kook, I finally got the administrator of this fraud and talked to him. For brevity I won’t tell you how long it took me to get these greedy scoundrels off my back. Then the Charlotte doctor called me on the phone and apologized profusely and begged me to “let it go” after I had promised the crooks in SC I was going to my attorney general AND the attorney general of SC.
Fast forward 4+ years. The time came here in Asheville for me to have my colon invaded again, so I called Asheville Gastro. An appointments lady there pleaded with me to have their woman doctor perform the formalities, so I agreed. I was to pay cash because I had no insurance and was not yet qualified for medicare.
After all that pain and suffering with the harsh laxative scraping everything — and then some — out of my intestines, I showed up for the procedure. As usual I was administered an intravenous cocktail of demerol and benzodiazepine (Versed) and went through the procedure just as conscious as if nothing had happened. I watched the closed circuit TV screen while everyone else in the room tended to business. All of a sudden this doctor-woman exhibited a snare with a sharp-looped cutter on the end and purported to slide it up my chute and snip something off inside my colon, just a few inches above my rectum. I could see there was nothing there but healthy pink tissue…and certainly no polyp. So this was a fraud. The doctor then probed around upwards for a while… and soon enough the ceremonies were concluded.
Later this doctor, who was soon to quit Asheville Gastro and go elsewhere (or be fired), called me back in for a checkup. She went up my chute and purported to locate the area where she had performed her phantom polypectomy. I was fascinated to see her stick a sharp instrument into healthy, unscarred tissue and cause me to bleed like a stuck hog, but with utterly no pain.
Later I called Asheville Gastro, the only trick in town, and made a fuss. A young Jewish doctor, who impressed me with his gentle manner and candor, went into my colon with his scope and told me he could find no scar. “You won’t,” I told him, “because there had been no polyps and she only went through the motions of removing a polyp. She is a crook.”
Still, a SC pathology lab bill and the bill at Asheville Gastro had piled up to somewhere around $1,000. I wouldn’t pay it and told the bill collectors that I had been fending off a horde of frauds. I told them to “go to hell.” There is no gastroenterologist in WNC who will see me now because Asheville Gastro has ruined my credit with a corrupt bill for services. So now for years I have been playing Russian Roulette with my colon. The only thing I have done is smear little coupon cards provided by my family doctor with small dabs of fecal matter. However, I have been very careful to eat wisely, coddle my microbiome with Mediterranean-styled food, and hope I don’t come down with the dreaded killer, colon cancer.
By the way, my dad lived to be 95 and it was a psychopath urologist digging around in his bladder who killed him. I don’t doubt in my mind for one minute that THAT rat-faced little doctor worked a fraud on my poor old father who was filled with the ambition and the promises of his Heavenly Father to live to be 100 years old. The doctor had made all kinds of promises to my dad, and then when he was in recovery put on his chart he was to receive Tylenol for his post-operative pain. He began climbing the walls in his room at MMH in excruciating agony when I ran to the nurses’ station screaming and demanded something to kill his pain. They thought they could intimidate me with “We’ll call security if you don’t quieten down.”
“You call security,” I said. “I’ll take them to my father’s room and show them how you are causing an old man to needlessly suffer.” A few minutes later an RN was there in my father’s room, as my sister and I watched, giving him a shot of demerol. Because of the brutal stress of this “sawbones” operation, my dad was dead less than a month later. The doctor had been banging away at my father’s bladder AND his wonderful BCBS health insurance policy. I saw his huge bills, all paid by BCBS.
buncyblawg.com 
The medical fraud (sham procedure/biopsy) reminds me of my four divorce lawyers in my first divorce (not the second one before ditz brain Andrea Dray) who back in Elizabethtown and Louisville, KY in 1991 billed me for tens of thousands of dollars for “review of file and preparation for trial.” Ghost hours. Like your sham biopsy during a colonoscopy. Yet 13 months later they weren’t ready for trial and suddenly blindsided me as we sat down at the court room table and urgently said that I had to settle because my “exposure was too high.”
The problem is by the time you realize how badly your lawyers have screwed up your case. It is too late. And you cannot sue them for legal malpractice. They will get off even when the special judge has immediately opined: “After having reviewed the record and making all reasonable inferences, this court concludes these four attorneys were negligent.” But then in flagrant abuse of summary judgment, the court would never let me produce my material evidence. It then “clarified” the opinion on motion by the Defendant lawyers to substitute “assumes for the purposes of discussion these attorney were negligent,” and then at the end of the opinion stated “The dispositive feature is that the Plaintiff settled his case.”
Nor would the KY Bar address this glaring fraud and incompetence. My ex-wife, the good doctor (now Professor of Anesthesiology at University of Louisville) ran off with the entire marital estate, full custody of the children, and an obligation for me to pay nearly double extrapolated child support and made no provision for a med-mal suit that had occurred during the divorce which would eventually require my paying an excess judgement of $150,000 in addition to the limits of my policy, rendering my practice worthless. But my practice had goodwill asserted my sophomoric lawyer from Louisville. My attorneys had not even obtained an accountant as an expert, despite having expended over $90,000 (1990 dollars) and 13 months preparation. They made no provision for the tax basis on what other marital property there was, nor for my pending medical license suspension (purely political because at that time Dr Fred Rainey, a Family Practitioner at my hospital, Hardin Memorial Hospital in Elizabethtown KY and President of the KY Medical Association was discovered to have been sodomizing boys in his office for decades and had raped both of his baby sitters- and the public was outraged at the KY Medical Board’s laxity in overseeing physicians,) for this same med-mal event which was tantamount to my doing my ex’s anesthesiologist job while she sat in our fully paid for home, my having paid off all her $50,000 med school premarital debts ( for which my lawyers failed to take into account) and had been collecting total statutorily prohibited maintenance ($4,500 a month) without one cent being imputed to her, a Board Certified, fully licensed, double fellowship trained (OB-GYN and Cardio Thoracic Surgery) physician anesthesiologist, house paid for, cars paid for, Investments paid for. No debt. I have all the video and document records. Bottom line, my ex gained $650,000 tax free 1990 dollars, and I wound up with zero marital assets. ZERO. But my losses due my attorney’s lying, deception and theft were nevertheless covered up and I was denied a jury trial– after all, my losses were “speculative.” Even with my two expert legal opinions and the judge recognizing the existence of legal malpractice, my case was thrown out. The evidence, no matter how material, would never be allowed to see the light of day, and the Appellate Court went along with sham ruling. And I was the faithful one, no alcohol, drugs or any of the “what else is he not telling us.” My ex was the one who was running around (literally and figuratively, (she was training for 10K races and won the Louisville Marathon in 1991) refusing to work, and yet dropping our two kids off in third party care for most of the day which I paid for. And the Commissioner John Seldomridge and Judge Hugh Roark of Division II District Court in Elizabethtown KY were absolutely incompetent, dumb and dumber, and the two local lawyers knew these two buffoons could be played for the morons they truly were- to prolong the case for their mutual financial benefit. I even had gotten two lawyers in Louisville (hence 4 lawyers) as a second opinion. These two lawyers protected the first two and took a wrecking ball to my divorce, and made things even worse. My case was stone simple.
So back to your colonoscopy. I too had mine performed by Asheville Gastroenterology in around 2020. It went well and I had a very tiny polyp, a sessile polyp that was only a little bump. But it was biopsied and predictably negative. But all cancer starts out from a single cell and so it had to be biopsied. I was completely knocked out by my Versed conscious sedation though. Strange that you were awake and able to remember the events. Versed can often result in temporary amnesia.
But when I was in orthopedic practice (when the NC Medical Board wasn’t harassing me,) and I scoped a patient’s knee, I ALWAYS took multiple pictures of the knee, whether it was normal, (rarely,) or the actual joint surface, injury, or cartilage tear both BEFORE and AFTER I excised it and made three picture copies: One for the hospital, one for my records, and one for the patient. Always.
Since my career was essentially ruined in that med mal case earlier in KY (I came to NC in 1995 as a “medical refugee”) because a registered nurse, in a premeditated act, had directed a tech to “fetch” the drug for which I had given a direct verbal order to the RN , and which the RN had written on her scrubs and read back verbatim, it being the only drug in the case, but then against all nursing and hospital rules of conduct, directed this unauthorized tech to fetch the drug, but the tech, not knowing which drug she had been told to get, testified she selected and drew what she thought was the correct drug but instead selected and drew up a lethal one and handed the syringe to the nurse who did not check. I was unaware this prohibited transfer of duty had occurred behind my back as I stood at the operating room table. The 21 year old man died on the table from the lethal injection- just to treat a table saw laceration to his finger. “It was sensationalized on national television’s “A Current Affair.” Nothing happened to the nurse or the tech, or the MD anesthesiologist who had begged off the case in violation of his professional duties and hospital rules. He was a pathological liar and then tried to solicit a conspiracy to cover up the cause of death as a “severe allergic reaction.”
Even the KY Medical Board’s own medical panel expert in my orthopedic specialty, the standard by which they had originally held me to in their minutes, and the required same specialty standard for substantial evidence, was ignored and the Board then switched me to anesthesiology standards. My attorney failed to defend me on this most fundamental legal standard of care by not moving for immediate summary judgment. The KY Medical Board had no expert in my specialty as required by law, therefore they had no evidence, whereas I had the Board’s own expert as the only evidence, and it was purely exculpatory. My lawyer wanted to keep the hearing going so as to keep his meter running.
A lot more in my memoirs mentioned in my other post. People don’t realize what scum lurks in the medical field as well as the legal-judicial collective; from the court clerks (who protect the judges and lawyers so as to keep their government paychecks and pensions) to the attorneys on both sides of the case, to the Judges, to the Judicial Review Committees– they’re all in on it. Is a collective to preserve the rigged system. Whether you as a client ever get justice is PURELY secondary.
But as far as your colonoscopy and your dad’s cystoscopy, probably not much you can do. Medical Board members are appointed by the State Governor and I too went through a long ordeal by the NC Medical Board where even after ordering me to submit to a total of 5 evaluations by their 5 experts, not mine, all of whom cleared me, they then had to resort to sending me out of state (witness shopping) to a treatment center (Talbot in Atlanta) who had a minimum of a $50,000 conflict of interest in finding that I needed emergent in-house treatment at their facility for “anger management.” They then discovered they had no such program to accommodate the NC Medical Board’s new 2002 crusade against the “disruptive physician “ (Gee, I wonder why I was so angry?-more in my memoirs.) So they sent me to Pine Grove in Hattiesburg, MS where upon arrival they informed me they had no such program either. No matter, they suddenly diagnosed me as an alcoholic/ drug addict and required that I attend AA meetings, the 12 step Program, Caduceus, and sit around all these impaired doctors (alcoholics, druggies, sex offenders and every cockroach that can crawl under a rock) all day as my treatment. Problem is, there has never been a suspicion, a rumor, a finding by any expert, including the 5 NC Medical Board who had evaluated me, or at the evaluation at Talbot, a failed drug screen, a DUI or DWI-EVER IN MY FUCKING LIFE!! I am practically a teatotaler and everyone knows it. What Pine Grove in Hattiesburg did was fraud, coercion, medical malpractice (gross negligence). When I returned, the orthopedist in Elizabeth City Albemarle Hospital who had essentially taken over what was left of my practice while I was in exile turned out to be…you guessed it… the alcoholic! The director of NC Physicians Health Program, Dr Warren Pendergast, left me off the “monitoring contract” over the phone on the spot when I told him what happened and I never heard from them again. These treatment centers were even the subject of a 2014 North Carolina audit by the Democrat party about fraud and kickbacks involving these treatment centers who schmooze these State Physician Health Programs for referrals. It’s big business and doctors are easy marks, as they are willing to pay small fortunes to protect their licenses. “Comply doctor, or we at the NC Physicians Health Program will report you to the NC Medical Board and you will lose your license! “
I should have sued Albemarle Hospital and Pine Grove but the defense would be the NC Medical Board has sovereign immunity -as do all their agents and appointed treatment centers.
Many (but not all) doctors are scum, especially those on Medical Boards. Those members are usually appointed by the State Governor. It’s political. The problem is, you don’t expect a lawyer to be honest or ethical- they are all about lying and money, and from there they get into politics. But you’d think doctors would be different. When the Medical Boards have an agenda, you a physician or in the alternative, a member of the public, may not get justice. Go ahead. Just try and fact check me. I have all the records, names, dates, jurisdictions, depositions, and videos. It’s a massive file now on digital format. But no lawyer will ever take me up on it. The media have all censored /shadow banned me from disclosing the truth about what went on in the hospitals, the doctors, the lawyers, State Medical Boards, Google, Facebook, Newspapers. Even my publisher Archway screwed me over by insisting I write my memoirs as “fiction” instead of an autobiography with references.
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