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Spring is the season for conferences and live events, which can go a very long way toward revitalizing your outlook....
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By: Dan O'Connor
Published: 6/4/2015
The story ran in most every major newspaper in the country. It was a headline-writer's dream and a lawyer's delight: "Man Wakes Up From Colonoscopy Wearing Pink Panties." We, too, reported on the allegations contained in the lawsuit filed by a 32-year-old employee of a surgery center who claims that he awoke from a 2012 colonoscopy to find himself wearing a pair of pink women's underwear.
Andrew Walls, who was employed by the Delaware Surgery Center in Dover, Del., as an orderly at the time, said in his lawsuit that he suffered severe emotional stress and mental anguish as a result of the pink panty prank. "The defendants' extreme and outrageous conduct went beyond all possible bounds of decency" and ultimately caused him to lose his job, reads the complaint. The intent, he says, was to "embarrass and/or harass [him] and to cause extreme and outrageous severe emotional distress and injury."
Mr. Walls was seeking unspecified compensation for lost wages and loss of earning capacity as well as punitive damages. Last month, a few days after his story began to unravel during his deposition, Mr. Walls had the good sense to dismiss the trumped-up claims against the surgery center. When Dennis Ferri, the ASC's lawyer, calls the lawsuit "silly, baseless and frivolous," this is what he means.
Mr. Walls may have dropped his case, but he's caused considerable damage to the Delaware Surgery Center. How do you restore your good name and reclaim your reputation for providing excellent, compassionate care? Those pink panty stories will live a long life on the Internet. Mr. Walls's lawyer, Gary Nitsche, didn't return several voicemails we left for him seeking comment. But Ms. Anderson thinks she might have found the proper perspective.
"Anything that goes into a newspaper that's something negative about your facility is upsetting," says Ms. Anderson. "It's an administrator's worst nightmare when something gets in the paper and becomes a PR issue. But I never had any fear that the allegations that were being claimed were true. But this is not just against Delaware Surgery Center. This is against individual staff members who take pride in their jobs. Our staff was very upset that someone would make such accusations."
Ms. Anderson knows she can't unring the bell, as it were, but she's emboldened that the truth came out and that her friends never left her side.
"It's didn't affect our volume one bit," she says, "We had a lot of support from the community."
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