FAYETTEVILLE-MANLIUS — With his new book on the importance of second opinions, 1974 Fayetteville-Manlius graduate William Reiley Butler has sought to provide direction and advice amidst a cautionary tale.
Over an eight-year stretch, Butler made it through 11 operations spread out among various New England medical facilities.
The first, an unsuccessful 2011 spinal procedure, had given him a life-threatening infection that surgeons spent the rest of that year and three more operations trying to remedy. Along the way, his career in the business intelligence field as a high technology sales executive was halted, and he became physically disabled.
Later on, in 2015, Butler’s right hip began deteriorating — a downturn he attributes to the stress of the previous medical activity and his attempts to walk around with an injured spinal cord.
Pointing to the possibility of poorly filtered air and overcrowding in teaching hospital surgery rooms, he said the return to the operating table left him with a double hip infection.
“There should be only the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, the supporting nurse and a backup,” said Butler, a certified nursing assistant. “What they’ve found is the more people in the operating room, the more air that’s moved around. Plus, maybe somebody has a cold and it gets into the body.”
Although he assigns blame to certain surgeons he came across, Butler said he wishes he had gone the route of collecting a second or third opinion before following through with the damaging procedures. That method of taking charge, he adds, could have been health-fixing and cost-effective for him but life-saving for others.
Within the chapters of his Amazon bestseller “Navigate the Medical Maze,” a self-published roadmap to making comparative healthcare decisions, Butler draws from his personal backstory, interviews with medical professionals, and testimonials from other patients both positive and negative to address the right questions to ask when gathering information, the details of pain communication on a subjective scale, and the ins and outs of infection prevention.
“I don’t want the readers to go through what I went through,” Butler said. “One resident or doctor might see something different than another, so I’m trying to make sure that people have the ability to check out these things before it’s too late.”
Despite his physical limitations, Butler has slowly learned to walk again and even dance on occasion with the help of therapy classes and day-to-day usage of his treadmill. Now residing in Westborough, Massachusetts, a town about 30 miles west of Boston, he considers himself “happy as a clam.”
In addition to “Navigate the Medical Maze,” Butler is also set to re-release his first book about action plans for homeless individuals and people affected by substance abuse.
