STEALING RELIEF

Doctor Keeps Anesthesia for Himself

HUGH DOWNS, ABC NEWS Looking up at the world from an operating table is, in
itself, a frightening experience. But imagine being able to feel the
surgeon's knife as it cuts into your body. That can happen. Take it from
some people who know. They trusted their anesthesiologist. They believed
they wouldn't feel a thing. But they put their trust in the wrong doctor.
Instead of giving them the painkillers they desperately needed, he was
using their drugs himself. Once again, Tom Jarriel has the bizarre tale of
the doctor who became his patients' worst nightmare.

TOM JARRIEL, ABC NEWS (VO) In the town of Hazleton in central Pennsylvania,
people in need of medical care come to the top of the hill on Church
Street, to Hazleton St. Joseph's Medical Center, fondly known as St. Joe's.
That's where Lori Opiary went last summer when she needed major surgery to
remove part of her colon. She expected discomfort, but not agony.

LORI OPIARY, FORMER PATIENT The worst memory that I have is that night. I
can't describe it any differently.

TOM JARRIEL (VO) When Lori awoke from surgery, she says she felt like she
had been shot in the stomach.

LORI OPIARY Tears started to come down my eyes. The pain was-it was
horrible. It was the worst pain I've ever had in my life. And I couldn't
tell anybody about it. I had a tube down my nose and I'm thinking, I have
to tell somebody I'm in all this pain. And I can't talk. What am I going to
do?

TOM JARRIEL (VO) She says her anesthesiologist worked on her, but it didn't
seem to help. She was left alone for the night.

LORI OPIARY I had a needle in my spine, and I was laying flat on my back.
It's almost as if I was shot and left to die. That's what it felt like to me.

TOM JARRIEL (VO) Hours later, Dr Donna Umali, another anesthesiologist,
arrived on duty and says she heard cries of distress from Lori's room.

DR DONNA UMALI, ANESTHESIOLOGIST Shout, shouting. I was in the nurse's
station, and that is-her room is at the end of the hallway.

TOM JARRIEL (VO) Dr Umali investigated.

DR DONNA UMALI I saw her doubling up in bed, sweaty, pale. And I said,
"What's going on here?" The nurse told me, "There's no pain relief here." I
said, "Did you tell Dr Peterson?" "We cannot find him."

TOM JARRIEL (VO) Dr Frank Peterson was Lori's anesthesiologist, whose job
it was to control her pain. He says he did. But Peterson had a secret. He
was a drug addict, a man hiding a long criminal history with arrests for
hitting a bus window with a steel bar; stealing money from a restaurant, an
ex-heroin addict whose roots were in the tough streets of New York City. He
had been a taxi driver, an amateur boxer who earned a medical degree and
believed he had kicked the drug habit. But he could only land a job on the
Pacific island of American Samoa. There, he claims, an ankle injury led to
painkillers and then more serious drugs-drugs found at the pharmacy in his
new job at St. Joe's, drugs intended for patients like Sharon Kachmar.

SHARON KACHMAR, FORMER PATIENT Burning, pulling, just terrible, terrible pain.

TOM JARRIEL Sharon came to St. Joe's for a cesarean section to deliver her
son, Josh. Dr Peterson gave her an epidural that was supposed to numb her
from the waist down. But when the surgeon began cutting, Sharon says she
felt the knife slicing into her skin.

SHARON KACHMAR I screamed out, and I yelled, "Wait a minute, I felt that."
And Dr Peterson said to me, "Well, don't mistake pressure for pain." And I
said to him, this was not pressure, this was a sharp pain, a sharp cut. It
was not ...

TOM JARRIEL (VO) The greatest pain, she says, came when they reached into
her womb to get the baby. She couldn't scream because Dr Peterson was
holding a mask to her face. Instead, she clutched her husband's hand.

JOHN KACHMAR, SHARON'S HUSBAND I said to him, "Why is she squeezing my hand
so hard? Is she feeling this?" And he looked at me and he said, "It's love,
man. It's pure love." And he laughed.

TOM JARRIEL (VO) We found Dr Frank Peterson in block 3C-1 of the Luzerne
County Prison, convicted of burglary, drug possession and, most shocking of
all, withholding drugs from his patients and using them himself. Hospital
records show how he did it. Peterson signed out massive amounts of a
painkiller-a powerful narcotic, Sufenta. On charts, he wrote he was giving
it to his patients to relieve their pain. But instead, he diluted their
doses and kept most of the Sufenta for himself, leaving them in agony. (on
camera) Good morning. (VO) When Peterson spoke to us, he was a man without
remorse for the treatment he had given his patients, regretting only that
he had given doctors a bad name. (on camera) Each of these patients came
with total faith that the system was going to provide them a doctor who had
no problems, who could handle their pain.

DR FRANK PETERSON Yes, and in that ...

TOM JARRIEL And they feel it failed.

DR FRANK PETERSON And perhaps it did. I am not claiming innocence. I did
something that was-it was terrible. I undermined the confidence of the
public in the medical community. And that's-that can't be tolerated.

TOM JARRIEL So how could this have happened? And should one man receive all
the blame in a hospital with checks and balances to avoid just such a
scandal? Top administrators at St. Joe's hospital knew Peterson had a
history of drug addiction when he started working there last June. But he
told them he was clean, and they believed him. We wanted to ask the
hospital how they could give staff privileges to a former drug addict and
not keep close tabs on him. But they refused to speak with 20/20, citing
pending litigation. (VO) In court documents, they've said they're the
victims in this case. They were lied to by Peterson and acted reasonably
and in an appropriate manner. (on camera) They say they were the victims of
this, the hospital.

MARGARET KULKUSKY, FORMER NURSE SUPERVISOR The patients were the victims.
The hospital? Once they knew that there was something wrong, then they were
no longer the victims.

TOM JARRIEL (VO) Margaret Kulkusky was a nurse supervisor at St. Joe's, who
has since been fired. She says she knows the hospital knew something was
wrong because she went to management and told them that Peterson's
procedures weren't working. His behavior was abnormal. The staff suspected
he was using drugs. Records 20/20 has obtained show Peterson was tested for
drugs the very next day. Early results showed methadone, a class-2 illegal
narcotic, in Peterson's urine. But surprisingly, he was not suspended.

DR FRANK PETERSON The hospital did nothing wrong.

TOM JARRIEL (on camera) Did nothing wrong?

DR FRANK PETERSON No, they did nothing wrong.

TOM JARRIEL They hire you, as a man who has an admitted record of
addiction? They don't have close supervision ...

DR FRANK PETERSON Is that a crime?

TOM JARRIEL Absolutely not. Except it's a good ...

DR FRANK PETERSON Tom, Tom, my self-esteem is in your hands.

TOM JARRIEL ... it's a good warning sign, something that perhaps they
should have caught sooner than two months, it seems to me.

DR FRANK PETERSON The hospital is in a very delicate situation with this.
And I can see where they were coming from.

TOM JARRIEL (VO) Maybe Peterson can see where the hospital is coming from
because he and they are now co-defendants in a malpractice lawsuit filed by
Peterson's patients. Despite the fact that Peterson pled guilty to
assaulting his patients by stealing their drugs, he now says he didn't do
it. He claims he just took what was left over and did not cause patients
needless pain. (on camera) Are you saying, Doctor, it was a strange
coincidence that a number of patients, your patients, say they experienced
extreme pain?

DR FRANK PETERSON That's something that I really can't answer.

TOM JARRIEL Your job was to control the pain.

DR FRANK PETERSON Well, first of all, you have to understand that pain is
extremely subjective.

SHARON KACHMAR I don't understand how ...

TOM JARRIEL (VO) Tell that to these people. They say Dr Peterson's
procedures left them in excruciating pain during what was supposed to be a
time of joy-childbirth.

LORI MCAFFEE, FORMER PATIENT I felt everything. I felt all that pain
because of him.

CHARLENE KUCHAR, FORMER PATIENT How he can say he didn't cause pain when he
knew consciously that he was skimping on medication ...

DR DONNA UMALI As a physician, I think patients should be protected.

TOM JARRIEL (on camera) Were Dr Peterson's patients being protected?

DR DONNA UMALI I don't think they were protected because they suffered.

TOM JARRIEL (VO) Dr Umali says she was so angry at hospital administrators
for allowing Peterson to continue, she decided to resign. Incredibly, there
was talk of giving Peterson a promotion. Then something even more amazing
happened-the hospital received final test results, proof that Peterson was
using Sufenta, the narcotic he was supposed to be giving his patients. But
still he was allowed to continue his work unsupervised. (on camera) They
say you were their worst nightmare. That they came to you to relieve their
pain during a moment of crisis in their lives, and the pain was not relieved.

DR FRANK PETERSON Well, I can just answer your question with a question.
What did they do before the invention of epidurals? Somehow we've made it
through several million years of childbirth. It's amazing we're still here,
isn't it?

TOM JARRIEL (VO) Finally, on August 8, two months and five days after he
began, St. Joe's hospital suspended Frank Peterson. But they didn't call
the police until four days later, after he broke into the hospital and
stole more drugs. Ed Harry was the detective who investigated the case,
turning up a large cache of drugs and paraphernalia in Peterson's home. (on
camera) Whoa, looks like he was running a hospital.

DET. ED HARRY, HAZLETON, PA POLICE DEPARTMENT All of the rooms that we went
into had catheters, needles, hypodermic syringes, IV tubing, empty vials of
drugs.

TOM JARRIEL (VO) Harry says Peterson made a full confession.

ED HARRY I asked him how many of the patients that he had-did he take drugs
from?

TOM JARRIEL (on camera) Right.

ED HARRY And he said, "All of them."

TOM JARRIEL Did he express any sorrow, any sympathy, any empathy at all for
the patients?

ED HARRY His main concern was in losing his medical license.

TOM JARRIEL (VO) Peterson has lost that license to practice medicine in
Pennsylvania for 10 years. But like the boxer he once was, Peterson may be
down, but he's not out of the medical profession.

DR FRANK PETERSON There are possibilities that I can go overseas. There are
some countries who desperately need physicians who aren't encumbered by the
morass of legality that this country is. They say a fool is one who does
not learn from experience. I've been pretty much of a fool so far. Let's
hope I can wise up.

HUGH DOWNS Tom, what's going on with this doctor now?

TOM JARRIEL Hugh, misfortune continues to follow him. Since we last met Dr
Peterson, he was accepted into a drug rehab program in the state of
Washington while he was a prisoner still in Pennsylvania to sort of clean
up his act. But while he was there, he tested positive for marijuana use.
So they kicked him out of that program, sent him back to prison in
Pennsylvania. He has completed his sentence, and he's left there now.

HUGH DOWNS I hate to have to ask you this, but is there any chance of this
man practicing again anywhere, any time?

TOM JARRIEL Hugh, the record will catch up with him. The last we could find
was in the Seattle area, and he would have to pass state examinations to be
recertified for a doctor. With this type of a record, it seems very slim
that he would ever have a chance.

HUGH DOWNS Not likely. All right. Thank you, Tom.

TOM JARRIEL Certainly.

Content and programming copyright 1998 ABC News