Five Hospitals and a Medical Journey Through Hell

In this memoir, Roger reveals at the age of twenty Terry was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and was not expected to live. Despite her dire prognosis, she survived radiation treatments but was left with side effects that continued to plague her throughout her lifetime. Roger focuses on Terry's medical long-term effects from the early radiation treatments that, over many years, resulted in her deteriorating health. In medicine, he discusses Terry's successes, but also reveals the inexcusable events that ultimately led to her untimely death at the age of sixty-seven. Roger discusses the doctor's and hospital's differences in opinions of how best to address the same medical calamity, "third spacing", which resulted in very different results.

Five Hospitals and a Medical Journey Through Hell is a story of an intestinal obstruction surgical failure in 2013 not revealed for nearly one year. The surgical failure resulted from the medical condition “third spacing”, whereby doctors did not adequately control fluid that entered the pleural and peritoneal cavities. One year later in 2014, re-obstruction corrective surgery was effective at a different hospital, when early intervention of “third spacing” prevented surgical failure. Then in 2016, a spinal abscess surgical procedure was performed at that same hospital as in 2014. An entirely different group of doctors were responsible for the post-surgical after care. Again, failure to adequately control “third spacing”, as had happened in the first intestinal obstruction, resulted in complications eventually leading to Terry’s removal from life support.