Got a call yesterday from a woman who had a stroke of bad luck.
So she went to her scheduled dental surgery a few days ago for the extraction of a bum tooth. It was a large dental office with a lot of hustle and bustle.
Remember Murphy's Law? Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
(I always loved Murphy's Law. Click on the image for my favorite Murphy's Law book.)
You can probably guess where this is going... would you believe that the surgeon walked in and carelessly and cavalierly removed the wrong tooth?!!!
Without going into the web of medical, legal, and ethical issues here, let's just process one single point: she did nothing wrong, she was a 100 percent victim.
Sometimes we can sort of blame the victim. We can say that they shouldn't have been on that road at that hour. Even if we would never say so out loud, but we all know that people put themselves in dangerous situations all the time.
This was not such a case. It was a routine dental procedure. It was complete negligence and victimhood.
Now for privacy reasons I am not going to say much about the case including what city it occurred in. But I would like to suggest taking a contrarian approach to the story as a trigger for some interesting Shabbat table conversation.
While she is a victim and the dentist was negligent, I highly doubt that the dentist is a bad person. In fact, she told me that he was extremely remorseful and already offering to try to make her "whole" with an expensive dental implant (free of charge).
Haven't we all been there? Haven't we all inadvertently hurt someone, maybe through carelessness?
My question for your table is this: Is making her "whole" by replacing the wrongly-extracted tooth with the best implant that money can buy enough? Is there anything more that he can do, or should do? What would you do?
Shabbat Shalom
