Searching for some sign of Desai’s humanity

He sits there day after day in the courtroom staring straight ahead through custom eyeglasses, his eyes wide, wide open.

Yet there is no indication that he sees the testifying prosecution witnesses, many of whom believe him evil.

You blink long before he does.

His hair is carefully combed. His dark suit pressed.

His square jaw is either set in stone, which body language experts say is a sure sign of tension, or clenched, which those same experts describe as a sign of anger — the muscles of his jaw become drawn so tightly that they smack of violin strings.

Is he angry because so many people believe him an embarrassment to the medical profession?

Is he tense because health officials say his clinic, where many men and women went to be screened for colon cancer, made many people sick with hepatitis C as a result of unsafe injection practices? Or is he angry because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention use what happened at his clinic as an example of how not to care for people?

Is he angry because an autopsy concluded that Rodolpho Meana died of complications of hepatitis C contracted at his clinic?

Or is he tense simply because he may go to the slammer?

You can’t help but wonder what Dr. Dipak Desai thinks as he sits there. Staring straight ahead. Eyes wide, wide open.

As Desai stands trial with nurse anesthetist Ronald Lakeman before District Judge Valerie Adair on more than two dozen charges, including second-degree murder and criminal neglect of patients, you actually find yourself hoping that this man who is as animated as a cement block doesn’t have a heart of stone.

You want to believe he actually feels the pain of his fellow man.

He has been, after all, a medical doctor for decades, part of a profession that should have, at its very core, a fierce caring for the well-being of mankind, an empathy which conjures that of Mother Teresa. Even if, as his lawyer suggests, what happened at his clinic was just innocent ignorance of infection control protocols, you want a doctor associated with such a tragedy to somehow acknowledge the pain so many have suffered because of it.

How you wish you saw some sign of humanity from him — a tear, a bowing of the head, a grimace, a wiping of his brow, anything — as Stacy Hutchison, a victim of the 2007 hepatitis C outbreak, broke down in tears on the witness stand as she testified about the hell she’s been through. How you wish he had been somehow moved by the video deposition of a desperately ill Meana — taken shortly before his death — when it was played in the courtroom.

Whether you’re tense, angry or nearly comatose, how could you not have an emotional response to such human suffering playing out before you?

But there was nothing.

This week Desai’s attorney Richard Wright is expected to start his client’s defense. You hope we’ll hear something from the doctor himself that makes us think he’s not the cold-blooded engineer of assembly line medicine that the prosecution portrays, a man who deliberately engaged in unsafe injection practices to save a few cents, who was in such a hurry to make more money he began painful procedures on patients even before the anesthesia took hold.

Actually hearing from the doctor is highly doubtful, however. Remember, even though medical experts say Desai is fully capable of expressing himself intelligently, Wright has essentially put up the argument in hearings that minor strokes have made it difficult for his client to remember what day it is.

Why is it important that we hear something mitigating from an honestly grieving Desai? Why do we want to hear something that indicates that what led to tens of thousands of people being tested for hepatitis and HIV — the country’s largest public health notification of its kind — wasn’t the brainchild of a stone cold sociopath?

Because if honest mistakes played no role in this ongoing tragedy that most certainly will shorten the lives of many of its victims, it means that the entire screening process for who can go to medical school and then get licensed to become a doctor doesn’t work.

If all the interviews and all the testing and all the background checks can’t detect a sociopath — an individual with no conscience — it means there are most certainly others out there in white coats dangerously putting profits before patients.

And that may be the most frightening realization to come out of the Las Vegas hepatitis outbreak.

Contact reporter Paul Harasim at pharasim@
reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2908.