This is the true story of a high school graduate and mother of three who successfully took on Florida’s powerful medical and insurance lobbies to change that state’s unfair malpractice laws as they applied to children.
On July 15, 1988 Elaina took her four-month old son, Tony, to St. Mary’s Hospital in Palm Beach, Florida for a hernia repair. It was to be a simple, forty-five minute surgery. The surgeon, as the result of gross medical incompetence, mistook Tony’s testicles for ovaries, sewed them up inside his abdomen, and emerged after nearly three hours in the operating room to inform Elaina that she didn’t have a son, she had a daughter.
At the end of four years of lies and cover-ups by the operating physician and other medical professionals, Elaina finally discovered the truth about what happened during that surgery and the injuries done to her son. One, possibly both, of Tony’s testicles had been damaged beyond repair; there was a 95% probability that he was sterile and that he would need hormone injections for the rest of his life; he had an enormous scar that stretched from hip to hip.
When Elaina tried to file a malpractice claim, however, she was told she was too late. Florida’s statute of limitations for medical negligence had already expired. The doctor who mutilated her son was never disciplined or reprimanded in any way and continues to practice to this day. Tony never got a day in court.
Elaina responded to this set of circumstances in an unusual way: although it could never benefit her or Tony, she set about changing the unfair law. After another four years, she succeeded. The children’s exception to Florida’s malpractice statutes of limitations- among the harshest in the country- is named for her son and remains on the books.
Although Tony’s Law was enacted in 1996, Elaina’s story remains as vital and relevant as ever. Medical malpractice , in terms of lives lost, devastating iatrogenic injuries, and the billions of dollars in monetary cost, remains a serious problem. Elaina was a twenty five year old waitress with a high school education, a history of depression and childhood abuse, and the victim of domestic violence. She took on the medical and insurance lobbies, the richest in the United States (financing her battle with garage sales and a paper route), and along the way dealt firsthand with forces that continue to keep medical malpractice a hidden epidemic, including institutionalized government corruption, welfare for the wealthy, income inequality, cronyism, sexism, our culture of toxic competition, the conspiracy of silence practiced by the medical profession, and the compliance of the corporate owned media.
