Jane Lazarre was pacing the hospital waiting room. Her son Khary, 18, had just had knee surgery, but the nurses weren’t letting her in to see him.
“They told us he would be out of anesthesia in a few minutes,” she remembered. “The minutes became an hour, the hour became two hours.”
She and her husband called the surgeon in a panic. He said that Khary had come out of anesthesia violently — thrashing and flailing about. He told Lazarre that with most young people Khary’s age, there wouldn’t have been a problem. The doctors and nurses would have gently held him down.
“But with our son, since he was so ‘large and powerful,’ they were worried he might injure the medical staff,” Lazarre said. “So they had to keep sending him back under the anesthesia.”
Khary was 6 feet tall. But he was slim.
[For more of this story, written by April Dembosky, go to http://khn.org/news/can-health...ured-of-racial-bias/]
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