Nov

If you checked in yesterday, you might now notice that there is a post missing; one in which I was letting off steam about a fruitless and frustrating encounter at my hospital on Friday.  I may have even said some… lets call them colourful things about the person I had the displeasure of encountering.  Anyway, my dad lives in the States, where people are forever suing each other, and he thought my post might be a bit slanderous, so I pulled it. 

But I wonder if I should have? Apart from a few speculations about this person’s pressing extra-curricular appointments, nothing I wrote was untrue.  I may have resorted to name-calling, yes, but at best that makes me uncharitable and at worst, immature.  Is it really grounds for a lawsuit?  And who sues a cancer patient for complaining about a doctor’s (appalling, unacceptable) lack of bedside manner?*  Wouldn’t that be terrible press for the hospital? 

Well, the unofficial (that means free) advice I got from a lawyer friend was “tone it down or take it down” so we may never know — the post has been pulled.  Let me be clear: not because I think it was in any way slanderous, but because if someone else thinks it is (like a team of hospital-backed lawyers, for instance) then the person in question wins and I end up with something to really be irked about – and nowhere to blog about it.

 *For the record I’m not talking about my oncologist. I love my oncologist and if anyone badmouths her they’ll incur my verbose and scathing ire.  This other guy however… Well, you know what they say: if you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit next to me!

Living with Breast Cancer