Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (12 page)

Whitcomb concluded that no one in the hospital fit the description of a blond female wearing a yellow pharmacy jacket. For all practical purposes, that description ruled out Swango as a suspect. In any event, Cooper’s observations weren’t reliable. She was no doubt “confused,” he said, which wasn’t surprising since she had been given an anesthetic for her surgery earlier that day. Utz, the roommate, was also unreliable, as Hunt had earlier noted, because she had a brain tumor. Whitcomb hadn’t interviewed her, either, but he did go over her patient file.

During Whitcomb’s interview, Beery, the student nurse, had softened her earlier account. Under what must have felt like cross-examination by Whitcomb, Beery acknowledged that she was “not certain” she actually saw a syringe in Swango’s hand. This, Whitcomb maintained, was inconsistent with her earlier statement that it “appeared” that Swango had injected something into Cooper’s IV. Because of this, Whitcomb told the group that Beery’s “identification testimony” was “shaky,” noting that she had been in the room only a short time. As he had suspected, she was an unreliable witness and her statement should be discounted accordingly. Thus, Beery’s statement in every interview that she had seen Swango in Cooper’s room and had been only a few feet away was also discarded as unreliable.

In diagnosing the cause of Cooper’s respiratory arrest, Whitcomb identified the fact that she shook the bed rails as all but incontrovertible evidence of a seizure followed by paralysis. (The possibility that Cooper could have rattled the rails before a paralyzing drug took full effect does not appear to have been considered.) Whitcomb had spoken briefly to Dr. George Paulson, a neurologist
at Ohio State, who said that it was “possible” for a seizure to be followed by paralysis. By contrast, drugs such as muscle relaxants might cause paralysis, but not a seizure. On that basis, and without speaking to any other specialists, such as anesthesiologists, Whitcomb diagnosed Cooper’s problem as “grand mal,” a severe form of epilepsy characterized by seizures and loss of consciousness—but not paralysis.

Whitcomb told the group he’d interviewed Swango, and that Swango had given him a version of the “slippers” story, in which Cooper had complained that her feet were cold. However, Whitcomb later told police an entirely different story: that Swango told him he was in the room to draw blood.

Nonetheless, Swango’s account appears to have been accepted as credible, even as Beery’s and Cooper’s versions were dismissed as unreliable and confused.

That was the end of Whitcomb’s report. As Hunt later summed up the evidence, “All we have is a crazy patient who had an unusual episode and a nurse who saw something. Is that enough to prove anything?” Tzagournis ordered that Swango, who had already returned to his work in the hospital, should resume his internship. The residents who worked with him in Rhodes Hall should be told that there wasn’t any evidence against him, but that he should nonetheless be “closely observed.”

The nurses, on the other hand, should be told only that Swango had been exonerated. And other doctors, including those on Swango’s future rotations, would be told nothing. On Tzagournis’s orders, there would be no further inquiry or investigation into the matter, and the police would be told nothing of the incident or the sudden increase in deaths.

Dickson had by now fallen into stunned silence. Swango’s accusers were all female nurses; his defenders, male doctors. She was convinced that the entire point of the so-called investigation had been to exonerate Swango and thereby avoid any liability or embarrassment to the university. She had tried to see the patient files herself; she was denied access. She felt it would now be impossible to observe Swango closely in the hospital. There was too much to do, and too few doctors who had been alerted to Swango’s suspicious activities, to keep him under close surveillance, especially if the
nurses and most of the doctors were kept in the dark. Still, she felt she had done what she could, at considerable personal risk. Now that Swango was back at work, and she had emerged as the strongest advocate for his dismissal, she thought it likely that someone on the medical staff would tell Swango. She was afraid to walk her dog at night alone, even in the safe neighborhood where she lived. She was afraid Swango would kill her.

Karolyn Beery, the discredited student nurse, was also frightened, and tried to avoid Swango. She and other nurses usually brought bag lunches to work, which they labeled with their names and kept in a refrigerator. “Who’s been messing with my lunch?” Beery asked a group of nurses one day, explaining that for several days, it had been obvious that her food had been rearranged in the bag. Then she started to feel nauseated, and developed headaches. She thought she might be pregnant, but three separate pregnancy tests were negative. After several weeks, when Swango left the neurosurgery rotation, her symptoms eased. She wondered if she was just being paranoid.

Dr. Carey met with all the residents on the rotations remaining on Swango’s schedule. He told them he was “worried” about Swango, that he wanted them to watch him closely and “report to me any untoward events, any patients that had complications or difficulties that weren’t expected.” As he later put it, “Our intent was to do everything possible to protect people from harm and get him out the door at the end of the year without risk that a court would order us to reappoint him.”

O
N
the same day as the meeting in which Swango was exonerated, Charlotte Warner, a seventy-two-year-old leukemia patient, had a routine splenectomy performed by Dr. Marc Cooperman. The operation went well and she recovered sufficiently to be transferred out of intensive care to Room 968 in Doan Hall.

Swango began working in Doan Hall on February 18 as part of his general surgery rotation. The next day, Cooperman met with Warner, found his patient to be doing very well, and talked with her about when she wished to be released from the hospital. That night, a nurse found her slumped on the floor by her bed. She was dead. An autopsy concluded she had suffered massive and unexplained
blood clots all over her body, including the liver, lungs, kidneys, and left coronary artery.

Dr. Cooperman was mystified and upset. As he later put it, “Basically what happened is she had developed clots in the arteries in her heart, in the vessels to the intestine, in the vessels to her kidneys, to her liver, and to her lungs. And I could never understand why this thing would have happened to somebody who had undergone a straightforward surgical procedure five days earlier and was walking around having no problems.”

That same month while Swango was in general surgery, he examined another surgical patient, Evelyn Pereny, with her attending physician, Dr. Carey. Later, the chief surgical resident, Gary Birken, was urgently summoned to Pereny’s bedside. She was bleeding all over her body—even from her eyes. As Dr. Birken noted, her coagulation was “off the wall,” as if she had been bitten by a poisonous snake, such as a “cobra.”

On the afternoon of February 20, Mary Popko came to visit her twenty-two-year-old daughter, Anna Mae, who had undergone intestinal surgery for a deformed bowel. She was sitting with her daughter when Swango asked her to leave the room so he could give Anna Mae an injection to raise her blood pressure. Popko asked to remain so she could hold her daughter’s hand. Swango refused, and she reluctantly left the room. Later that afternoon, Swango summoned Popko to a small conference room. He leaned back and put his feet on the table. “She’s dead now,” Swango said of Popko’s daughter. “You can go look at her.”

Popko later complained about what she considered Swango’s inappropriate comments and demeanor. “It seemed like it lifted his ego or something,” she said of her daughter’s death. “He just seemed so happy.”

Despite Dr. Carey’s warning, none of the residents who had been alerted about Swango reported anything unusual.

S
WANGO
completed his general surgery rotation and in April moved to Children’s Hospital for his pediatrics rotation. Swango had often mentioned to his fellow interns and residents how much he loved fried chicken, and one night he offered to get Kentucky Fried Chicken for the residents on duty with him. Thomas Vara, the senior
resident, said that would be fine, but suggested, “Instead of getting separate boxes, why don’t you get a big bucket for all of us to eat?”

“No, no,” Swango said. “Let’s keep it separate.” He insisted on taking everyone’s chicken and drink order. He returned with the orders about five
P.M
.

“It’s extra spicy chicken,” Swango told Ed Hashimoto, one of the residents, as he gave him his food. That was news to Hashimoto. He knew that Kentucky Fried offered “extra crispy” chicken, but he’d never heard of “extra spicy.”

Vara, Hashimoto, and a third resident, Douglas Hess, ate the chicken. About three hours later, all three fell violently ill, with fever, nausea, and vomiting that lasted over a week.

As Vara later described it, “It’s as sick as I’ve ever been. We were sick there at the hospital. The other guys were, Jesus . . . like in the operating room vomiting in their masks and stuff. That’s how bad it was.”

When the doctors later discussed the episode, they thought maybe they’d suffered a violent reaction to something in the chicken. But then they tended to discount their own theory. After all, Swango, too, had eaten Kentucky Fried Chicken. He hadn’t been sick at all.

C
OOPER
, the elderly born-again Christian whose brush with death had triggered the investigation of Swango, recovered from her back surgery and mysterious respiratory arrest without further incident. Before she was released, the hospital prepared a written “discharge summary,” which became a part of her permanent hospital record, something that would be produced in the event of any lawsuit. The summary contains a description of the Swango incident:

Post operatively during the evening of surgery, the patient had a witnessed pulmonary arrest. She was noted to have seizure-like activity just prior to this arrest . . . when the patient received adequate oxygenation via endotracheal intubation. She was awakened and was intact neurologically. However, her sensorium was noted to be unusual in that she had apparent paranoid ideation as to the cause of her respiratory arrest. The patient gave indication
that she entertained some paranoid ideation regarding the cause of her respiratory arrest and felt that it may be due to unnamed person or persons. The patient was carefully observed for further psychologic parameters of this nature . . . .

In other words, in the official opinion of the hospital that had treated her, and where she nearly died, Cooper was mentally unstable—“paranoid.”

CHAPTER
FOUR

T
HE RESIDENCY REVIEW COMMITTEE
at Ohio State met in late February 1984 to consider Swango’s status. At the end of his neurosurgery rotation earlier that month, Dr. Carole Miller—who, despite supervising Swango’s work, claims she was never told of the Cooper incident and investigation—had written a letter to Dr. Hunt (her future husband) concluding that Swango “didn’t demonstrate the qualities required of a neurosurgeon.” She based her assessment on Swango’s failure to inspire confidence in patients and other staff members rather than on any specific incident. Dr. Ferguson, who had given Swango such a negative evaluation in the transplant rotation, went so far as to write a letter urging Swango’s firing after he heard reports about the Cooper affair. As a result, the committee voted not to continue Swango’s residency when he completed his internship at the end of June. But in keeping with Tzagournis’s orders, and out of fear that Swango might sue Ohio State, he was allowed to complete his internship and continue his work in the university hospitals. Dr. Hunt notified Swango of the committee’s decision by letter dated March 2.

But just five days after the letter rescinding Swango’s residency appointment, three doctors on the university’s medical faculty submitted recommendations on his behalf to the Ohio State Medical Board, to which Swango had applied for a permanent license to practice medicine. Two of these “certificates of recommendation” were made on a standard form supplied by the medical board. One was from Dr. Whitcomb, who had been in charge of the hospital investigation of Swango. He rated Swango’s “medical knowledge and technique,” his “ability to work well with peers and medical staff,”
and “his relationship with patients” all as “good.” Whitcomb left blank the space for “personal comments, evaluation and recommendation.” The other recommendation was submitted by Dr. Gary Birken, who had treated the patient with the mysterious bleeding. In the same categories, he rated Swango as “excellent,” “excellent,” and “exemplary.”

The third recommendation was submitted by Dr. Carey, the head of surgery, who was also involved in the hospital’s investigation. The form he used differed slightly from the other two. He rated Swango as “good” in the three areas mentioned. But in the space for comments, he said he was recommending Swango with “reservations.” This triggered an inquiry from the medical board in May, and Carey elaborated briefly on his recommendation in a letter dated June 5. He wrote that while Swango had completed his internship at Ohio State, he had not been appointed to a second-year residency. Carey also wrote: “There was a suggestion concerning a patient’s demise with regard to Dr. Swango having been in attendance proximate to the demise. This was investigated rather thoroughly and Dr. Swango was exonerated.” Though he didn’t mention the patient by name, Carey must have been referring to Cooper, even though she didn’t die, since none of the
deaths
linked to Swango had been investigated at all, let alone thoroughly. Carey’s letter went on to say that Swango’s performance had been “substandard,” that he had “difficulty relating to paramedical personnel,” and that he did not relate well to nurses and other hospital employees.

Carey’s letter thus reduced Swango’s troubles at Ohio State largely to an issue of personality differences with paramedics and nurses—hardly sufficient grounds to deny an otherwise qualified doctor a medical license. Virtually all of Carey’s major assertions are, at the least, open to question: Cooper didn’t die, but survived as an eyewitness; Swango was more than a bystander who was “proximate” to the incident—he was alleged to have caused it; the investigation wasn’t thorough; and Swango was hardly “exonerated.” Even Tzagournis had ordered that Swango be watched closely; Carey himself had told the residents he was worried about Swango.
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