I was driving to the store today (to buy ingredients for chex mix, stay on your toes for that post), when I heard a story on the radio that made me die a little inside.  This is not the first story of its kind, nor will be the last, I'm sure.   But still, every time I hear something like it, I want to smack someone in the face. 

So there was a woman, somewhere, that wanted to walk somewhere.  She didn't know how to get to said somewhere, so she did what all smart modern people do:  she Googled it.  Google reliably spit out some directions to wherever this woman wanted to go, she printed them out, and was on her way.  Well APPARENTLY, the directions took this woman onto a highway... or something like a highway.  It didn't have a shoulder, people were driving fast, it was dark out.  One might assume that when you arrived at a highway and were directed to go down it, but you had feet instead of a car, you would choose not to do that.  No, no.  Not her.  She walked down the highway.  And then she got hit by a car.  Alive, but injured, she did what any self-respecting person does.  She sued google.  Because it was THEIR fault that she walked down a highway AND got hit by a car.  Clearly, it had nothing to do with any intrinsic part of her genetic make up. 

And what's worse is someone has to entertain this suit.  She, God forbid, might even have a chance of winning.  Why?  I have no idea.  But she might.  I wonder what gives a person the idea that they can sue for things like that.  I despise the mentality that says, "I came out on the bad end of a situation, so someone should pay me for it."  It's rampant!  People think they DESERVE something because they got a raw deal.  Well, welcome to live, people.  Not everything goes your way.  People get hit by cars.  Bugs end up in food.  Houses burn down.  Lightening strikes buildings.  People are born with diseases.  That doesn't give you a right to find someone to blame it on.  Sometimes stuff just happens, and you have to mourn and move on.

Maybe I'm acutely sensitive to this because of being in the medical field and carefully thinking about how I will let medical legal issues affect my practice.  People practice defensive medicine, order unnecessary tests and imagine and labs simply to protect themselves against getting sued.  Not getting sued for making medical mistakes, but getting sued because of a bad outcome.  I hate that's how medicine is being practiced here, now.  But I also understand that if you have to pay out in a law suit, it prevents you from caring from a huge number of patients.  Still, the fact that people think that money is compensation for the pain they've experienced in life is unbelievably frustrating to me.