I seem to be perseverating on morons this evening. The story that is bugging me tonight concerns Florida’s Surgeon General. Florida is home of the second most stupid US Governor (Greg Abbott is the absolute worst). Dr. Ladapo is a pathetic excuse for a physician; he reminds me of a surgical resident from my residency back in the 1980s. My intern Linda and I were in the ED one evening evaluating a fellow who was short of breath. It turned out that he had a pneumothorax. Now, in some training programs, this situation might have been a toss-up between Surgery and Internal Medicine. That is, the admitting service could have been the one or the other.
Neither Linda nor I had any experience in placing chest tubes – the mechanical device needed to relieve this poor fellow’s misery. We called the surgery team on call. The senior surgery resident came to the ED, took a look at the patient and the x-ray, and he deftly inserted a large caliber needle and catheter into the patient’s chest – thus immediately relieving the patient’s respiratory distress. I asked him whether his team would be admitting the patient to the surgical service, and he waved me off as an irrelevant annoyance. “Hook him up to a vacuum cleaner and send him home in a taxi, for all I care,” he announced. Linda and I picked up the pieces. I was pissed, but I wasn’t going to let my emotions prevent me from doing what was correct and necessary.
Dr. Ladopo is a physician in the spirit of that surgical resident. He is a self-absorbed fuck-head. How can I say it more plainly? The surgical resident in the story above went on to set up a liposuction clinic in Houston, if memory serves. In short order, he was sued and lost his medical license for his cavalier and frankly dangerous medical behaviors that endangered his patients. “Good riddance, pendejo,” I say. The same should happen to Dr. Dickhead Ladapo who is as arrogant and stupid as the the Governor who appointed him the State’s Surgeon General.