He’S Rolling With Punches Life’S Dealt Him

He walks like a man trying to negotiate the deck of a ship in roiling seas, weaving a drunken path from point A to point B.

Riding in a car, he must remind himself that the telephone poles aren’t really jumping into the vehicle’s path, as it appears to his distorted sense of space.

For Spokane’s Shawn Macauley, even the smallest motions can evoke nauseating vertigo.

Life for this once-promising molecular biologist and his family changed horribly in the summer of 1996. An antibiotic prescribed to fight a serious infection destroyed Macauley’s delicate inner-ear nerves that control equilibrium and balance.

Macauley, 34, now suffers from an unusual condition called vestibulopathy. In simple English, he’s an airplane with a blown gyroscope.

Nobody gives much thought to the significance of the inner ear. A few minutes watching Macauley’s wobbly existence would change that.

Baby-sitting his three children is out of the question. Beth Macauley, Shawn’s wife of 10 years, says her husband’s reading has dropped to a sixth-grade level.

Macauley falls with regularity, a serious problem because of his size: 6-foot-3 and 300 pounds. One spill last year left him with a broken ankle.

“I can’t think of anything that is so pervasive,” says Macauley, who is able to walk thanks to a pair of forearm crutches. “I can’t work. I can’t drive. I can’t even eat my cereal and read the paper at the same time.”

Macauley blames the treatment he received through Group Health Northwest. The HMO’s doctors, he contends, misused the antibiotic Gentamicin, which is known to cause kidney and ear problems with extended use.

Macauley says he was on Gentamicin 29 days. He claims his physicians should have known better, that they failed to inform him of the risks.

Through his Spokane attorney, Keith Douglass, Macauley filed a lawsuit seeking unspecified damages. The case is scheduled for trial in the spring.

Group Health lawyer Tom Luciani denies all of the charges. The drug was prescribed properly, he argues, and Macauley’s limitations may not be as extensive as the man suggests.

“Some people who are worse off than Dr. Macauley can do more than Dr. Macauley claims he can do,” Luciani says.

Not to imply Macauley is faking, the lawyer adds. But “both experts we have have treated people with his degree of impairment and they are able to hold jobs, walk unaided and drive during daylight.”

Statements like that blast Macauley’s blood pressure into orbit. “If he had any idea what has happened to me,” he says, lips pursing.

“If I were given a check for $10 million today,” attorney Douglass says, “I wouldn’t go through what the Macauley family faces for their lifetime.”

The Macauleys’ world has certainly plummeted. This is a man who received a doctorate in medical sciences from the University of Florida. Beth has her own doctorate in speech pathology.

Before this catastrophe, Macauley worked as a research associate for Washington State University in Spokane. He specialized in the treatment of chronic wounds. A promising, perhaps brilliant, future lay ahead.

Then in late July 1996, the scientist began experiencing pain in his left shoulder. A serious staph infection was eventually diagnosed and Macauley was put on intravenous Gentamicin.

In every medical case the issues are complex and subject to interpretation. This, too, will be a battle of expert against expert although Luciani hopes for a better outcome than the last legal war waged against Group Health Northwest.

In October, a jury decided the HMO must pay $3.79 million to the family of a woman who died after a risky pregnancy went untreated.

Even if Macauley prevails, the scientist would gladly forfeit any settlement just to get his life back.

“There’s not a thing that hasn’t been affected by this,” he says. “I can’t even look at a computer screen when its scrolling. I feel like I’m going with it.”