Every Last Drop: How the Blood Industry Betrayed the Public Trust
294
Every Last Drop: How the Blood Industry Betrayed the Public Trust
294Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781490718408 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Trafford Publishing |
| Publication date: | 10/31/2013 |
| Pages: | 294 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d) |
Read an Excerpt
EVERY LAST DROP
How the Blood Industry Betrayed the Public Trust
By George T. Baxter
Trafford Publishing
Copyright © 2013 George T. Baxter, Esq.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4907-1840-8
CHAPTER 1
My office is across the street from the side entrance of the Bergen County Superior Court, within eyeshot of the county jail. "George T. Baxter, Attorney At Law" is freshly painted on the front window facing Hudson Street. I rubbed the "G" with my thumb vigorously, just to see if the friction would erode it. My thumb never quite stopped smelling of varnish. Hudson Street begins where Main Street ends, just past Callahan's bail bondsmen office, the bus stop, a World War I memorial and a few public benches. The benches are usually occupied with jurors and courthouse staff having their lunches. The doors of the nearby grocery store are covered almost entirely in lottery posters with curling edges.
I check my watch and hasten my pace up the stairs, skipping two steps at a time. The fabric of my pants tightened around my knees with each step. The mailman left the mail wrapped in a rubber band on the floor, since I have no receptionist. The florescent ceiling light flickers with a clucking noise before it begrudgingly agrees to stay on. The two rear windows have one-inch thick iron bars on them, and face a neighbor's undernourished backyard and pigeon coop. I head straight for the coffee maker, which sits like a rooster on top of a re-painted teal filing cabinet.
I rinse out the glass coffee pot and fill it with water in the men's room sink down the hall. It's an old, pre-war building with boxy sinks that are almost a prank on my large, awkward hands. The coffee pot clanks against the sides of the sink and I have to maneuver it under the water tap. I check the time again, look around and clear the files from the two chairs in front of my desk. I'm 32, a couple of years out of law school, and building a personal injury law practice. I sit back in my chair with my hands on my desk, the way I saw presidents sit in photos of the oval office. Except my office is quiet. There have not been any clients.
"Mr. Baxter?" A woman calls from the front door. I break out of my reverie to walk out to the reception area. It's Roslyn Snyder, the noon appointment. We spoke on the phone the day before.
"Mr. Baxter?" She repeats my name, looking around, as though wondering if she is in the right place. Roslyn is about 5' 5", late-fifties, wears no makeup and does not color her gray hair. Her eyes scan past where I'm standing but she keeps looking around the room anyway, as though she is expecting the real George Baxter to jump up from behind a filing cabinet and yell "surprise!"
"Hi, I'm George Baxter."
"I'm Roslyn Snyder, and this is my husband Bill." Bill is smaller than Roslyn. The skin on his face droops from its pronounced bone structure and he looks painfully tired. He is wearing an Anheuser-Busch work jacket and wrinkled khaki pants that obscure all but the pointed tips of his shoes. The pants are too loose for him, and I can hear them trail on the floor as we walk to my office.
"It's a pleasure to meet you." Roslyn and I shake hands. Her hand is thick and rough, like someone who works with them. "Come inside and have a seat." I offer them the chairs I had just cleared off. I notice a stray paper clip in one of the chairs and quickly flick it away before anybody could notice.
"Mr. Baxter, you said on the phone you do not charge for consultations."
"That is right—and please, call me George."
"Because we do not have money to pay a lawyer."
"I understand. Don't worry. Personal injury lawyers don't charge for consultations."
"So we will not be billed for this meeting then?"
"No. There is no fee unless I win you a settlement. Then, I take a percentage."
"All right."
I glance over to the top of the filing cabinet. "That is fresh coffee brewing." The smell of fresh coffee makes the frail office feel more comfortable. "Would you like a cup?"
"Bill, do you want some coffee?" Roslyn asks Bill, as though she is interpreting for me. He nods yes.
I reach for the package of Styrofoam cups behind the coffeemaker, but it is empty. "I forgot to pickup cups." On the desk is a ceramic Marine Corps mug, with the emblem of the Third Marine Amphibious Division proudly displayed on its facade. It is the only memento I have of my time in—shortly after I had dropped out of high school at age sixteen, until my twentieth birthday. It is an ornament that has never been used. I fill the mug with Maxwell House coffee and hand it to Bill. "Be careful, the mug is hot."
"Thank you." Bill takes a few sips then puts the mug down on the desk. I realize I forgot to offer the powdered creamer I had bought earlier just for this meeting.
"What is that noise?" Roslyn looks around the office, trying to pinpoint the sound.
"The pigeon coop." I try to be nonchalant, but the pigeons are cooing louder than usual. Bill and Roslyn look at each other, then me.
"Lets start from the beginning and see how I can help you."
"Well, Bill had shortness of breath that started after he retired from Anheuser-Busch, so we saw this cardiologist."
"What did he tell you?"
"That Bill had this blockage of his arteries. He sent us to see a surgeon at St. Joseph's—"
"What did the surgeon tell you?" Quit sounding so eager, I scolded myself.
"He says the reason Bill is tired all the time is because of the blockage. He says that bypass surgery will make Bill feel better and that it is routine these days. So we trusted him and went ahead. Then we moved down to Florida with the twins. We planned to enjoy what were supposed to be our golden years." "Twins?" They look too old to have young children.
"Bill and I adopted twin boys when they were babies, and it turned out they have brain damage."
"You didn't know they were brain damaged when they were adopted?"
"No, but we love them. They're twelve now." Bill and Roslyn were in their mid-forties when they adopted the boys.
"Bill, what happened after the heart surgery?"
"I got this letter here from the hospital telling me to be tested for AIDS, because the donor whose blood they gave me was infected." Bill takes out the tattered letter that he must have shown to a dozen lawyers. "So I got tested at Halifax down in Florida." Bill looks scared and ashamed, and cannot talk about it. Instead he slides it down the table towards me. I read the letter.
"I'm sorry, Bill." There's a silence, filled in by the pigeons.
"We can't tell anyone," Bill hisses.
"Nobody can know, not even our family." Roslyn says, almost as a condition.
"We have to protect our boys." Bill is adamant about this.
"What do you mean, Bill?"
"Are you kidding? Look what they did to those boys in the next county over from us."
Bill is referring to the August 29, 1987 burning of the Ray family home in Arcadia, Florida. The Arcadia school board voted to keep three hemophiliac brothers—Richard, 10; Robert 9; and Randy, 8—from attending school because they were infected with AIDS from contaminated blood products. Arcadia's mayor, George Smith, and other parents had taken their children out of school and enrolled them in private school to keep them away from the Ray boys. Clifford and Louise Ray, the boys' parents, challenged the DeSoto County School Board's ruling in Federal Court. The federal judge ordered the school board to allow the Ray boys back into classes. This ignited hysteria in Arcadia against the Ray family that included bomb and death threats.
One evening, while the family was away, an arsonist set fire to their home. The fire started in the boys' bedroom and their uncle, who was in charge of them for the weekend, was pulled from the burning house and almost died from smoke inhalation. When Clifford and Louise looked over the charred remains of their home, they were driven away by shouts: "Next time they won't be so lucky," and "Get out of Arcadia! Get out of town!" At a news conference, Clifford and Louise announced it was time give up the fight and leave Arcadia.
The Rays held the politicians and school board responsible for the panic that overtook the town and drove them out. Other Arcadia residents told reporters that homosexuals brought this "plague" about: "They should quarantine everyone one of 'em, isolate them just like they would do with measles or chicken pox." The same board of education committee that kicked the Ray boys out of school offered the family donations of food and clothing. People wanted to be charitable, but charity stopped at the point of fear about their own personal safety. They provided support at an arm's length, helping victims with what looked like charity on camera but treating them like animals that would bite them if they got too close.
This new, mysterious disease that killed everyone who contracted it revealed ugly social prejudices. Emergency room physicians in New York who saw gay men come in with skin lesions and die soon thereafter referred to it as W.O.G. ("Wrath of God") syndrome. AIDS was a queer's disease, God's retribution against them for deviant life-styles. The Reverend Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority, a new political force in American politics at the time, proclaimed AIDS had been prophesied as the precursor of the last days. National figures like Patrick Buchanan, a Republican presidential candidate, proclaimed, "The poor homosexuals—they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution."
The nightly network news frightened people with images of emaciated gay men who were dying, their bodies covered oozing lesions and skin tumors. The demands to quarantine AIDS patients from society by rounding "them" up and shipping them off to some remote Pacific island were real. AIDS had a social stigma worse than leprosy when Bill came to see me. It was a time when legislatures had to enact laws to protect AIDS patients from discrimination. I knew that if people found out I was fighting an AIDS case, that somebody with AIDS sat in my office, nobody except other AIDS patients would come to see me. I had to ask myself the question: "Do I really want to be known as an AIDS lawyer?"
"Do you have to disclose Bill's name?" Roslyn asks. "We're afraid that if we sue, it'll come out about Bill."
"I can use a 'John Doe' for Bill's name in the complaint, but I can't promise your identity won't come out. It'll be news, and people will be interested because it's a new AIDS case." Bill's case would be the first AIDS-transfusion lawsuit in New Jersey filed by a patient, and it is bound to create a stir.
"We can't risk it," Roslyn insists. "I just don't want anyone to take it out on my boys. They have the bodies of young men, but they have the minds of children. They wouldn't understand."
After a minute of silence, all I can say is: "It is something you need to consider."
"They lied." Bill said, breaking his stupor of silence. "They just lie to you and get away with it."
"Who lied, Bill?"
"They told me the blood was safe, that I would feel better after the surgery."
"Who told you this?"
"All of them: my doctors, the hospital, and the blood bank." Bill's anger fades to fatigue before my eyes at an alarming speed, like a deflating beach ball. Within minutes the blood drains from his face, his body shrinks inward, and his complexion turns ashen.
"You spoke with people at the blood bank?" I thought it was unusual.
"Yes." Roslyn jumps in.
"Tell me what the blood center said and how it came up?"
"We were starting to hear things."
"What kinds of things?"
"You know, things about blood not being safe."
"What did you say to the blood bank?"
"Bill has friends at the brewery who were willing to donate blood for him if he needed it. We didn't want blood from strangers. I asked if Bill could use his own donors."
"What did the blood bank say to that?"
"They told me that there was nothing to worry about, that blood is safe. They wouldn't allow us to use our own blood donors."
This is called designated donors. It's common practice today for family members to donate blood for each other in elective surgeries. The blood industry was against it then because it was an inconvenience. It messed with their procedural flow and overall control of the blood system.
"Everyone kept saying that there was nothing to worry about." Roslyn looks at Bill like she let him down.
"Look at me now." Bill had punched new holes into his belt to hold up his khaki pants. "I have diarrhea all the time, and my medications make me sick."
"Bill, are you all right?" Roslyn tries to calm him.
"I have to use the men's room." Bill tries to hold back tears, but can't.
"Here, you'll need the key." I hand Bill the key and he leaves for the men's room. Roslyn watches Bill until the door shuts behind him, and quickly turns to me.
"If something happens to Bill, I won't be able to handle the boys alone. I'd have to institutionalize them."
"How is Bill with the boys now?"
"They love him. He makes their lunches with them; he's better at helping them with schoolwork; and when Bill tells them to go to sleep at night, they listen. Even though Bill is tired most of the time, the boys still listen to him."
After a few minutes, Bill returns and I grab the legal pad from my desk and begin taking notes. "When did you have the surgery, Bill?"
"Four years ago, on August 23, 1984." My pen screeches to a halt.
"Bill, New Jersey has a two year statute of limitations for personal injury law suits. It begins to run from when you find out you are injured. You didn't know you were infected from the transfusion until the blood bank sent the letter to you, right?"
"I got the letter six months ago."
"All right." A narrow miss.
"It's about the boys," Roslyn adds.
"Roslyn, if blood banks weren't testing for AIDS when Bill was transfused because there was no AIDS test yet, then there isn't a case." I want to stay detached, as I was told to do by so many professors and law textbooks, and did not want to be distracted by emotions. A lawyer should never let his clients believe they are going to win. The best way to make sure clients don't get their hopes up is to bore them with terminology. "I know what's happened to you is awful, but there are two aspects to a personal injury case: Damages and liability. Liability is like fault. I have to prove it is the blood bank's fault that Bill got infected. Even though the blood infected him with AIDS, I am not sure the legal system can help you."
"You mean they can just get away with it?" Bill says.
"I can get your hospital records and see what I can find?" I don't expect more than a settlement, at best.
"What's your fee for taking the case?" Roslyn asks, looking around the office.
"I would take your case on a contingency. If I win, I would retain one-third. That is the standard contingency fee."
"Will you take less?" It is a surprise that Roslyn negotiates the fee. Clients never try to negotiate me down on a contingency fee.
"One-third is standard."
"Yes, but this happened to Bill and me."
"This is a difficult case. It will take a lot of time and I will have to advance the expenses too. And, if I don't win, then there is no fee. It is a big risk for me, Roslyn." I stop short of telling her it may not be a case at all. Bill and Roslyn stand up to leave. Roslyn wants a reduced contingency fee. They don't take me up on the offer and decide to shop around for another lawyer. Roslyn and I are indifferent and noncommittal. I am not sure it is a bad thing, because I am queasy over shaking Bill's hand.
Bill leaves my battalion coffee mug on the edge of the desk. I throw it into the metal wastepaper basket. It makes a load clank and dents the inside of the can. The nightly news has shown too many of those frightening, scarecrow-like images of emaciated gay men dying from AIDS. The alarming body count and new theories of person-to-person transmission dominate the airwaves. I think about my wife and daughter, and decide I can't risk it.
I realize I am late for a court settlement conference again. I grab an overstuffed red expandable legal file from the floor, turn off the lights, and lock the door from the outside. I make a quick pit stop in men's room on the way out, like I have done dozens of times. This time I remember Bill used it earlier. I roll out a few feet of tissue paper and cover the toilet seat, but then decide that is not safe enough and leave. People still wonder if the AIDS virus can survive on a toilet seat.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from EVERY LAST DROP by George T. Baxter. Copyright © 2013 George T. Baxter, Esq.. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing.
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