Have I mentioned lately that I hate the hospital?

I don’t hate them for letting me hemorrhage in their emergency room for over an hour , thereby forcing me to sign myself out and go to another hospital for help (I was having a horrible miscarriage a few days short of my second trimester). I don’t even hate them for sending me a bill.

But I DO hate them for siccing their lawyers on me and forcing me to delete the blog post in which I described that horrible two-hospital miscarriage. They’ve been harassing me, my employer, and my hosts with inaccurate, insipid crap. To wit:

Re: www.goblinbox.com/blog/archives/000446.html

Dear Ms. O’Connell,

Our office represents {name removed}, a hospital located in
Fairfield, Iowa. Enclosed with this letter is a copy of a blog published
by Michelle Morgan. Federal law as well as your Acceptable Use Policy
prohibits the publishing of defamatory information. The headline,
“{name removed} Tried to Kill Me” is clearly defamatory
within thte meaning of Iowa defamation law. Please advise within five
days of the receipt of this letter whether or not you will take action
to eliminate this posting which is clearly defamatory of {name removed}.

Sincerely,

Edwin N McIntosh
Dorsey & Whitney LLP

Uh huh. Rrrrright. OMG, where to even begin!

1. “a blog published by Michelle Morgan”
My name isn’t Michelle Morgan. Hasn’t been for years.

2. “The headline, ‘{name removed} Tried to Kill Me'”
The headline DID NOT read “{name removed} Tried to Kill Me”. I changed it weeks ago in an effort to comply with their bitch-ass requests.

3. “as well as your Acceptable Use Policy”
The host’s AUP does NOT prohibit the publishing of defamatory information. Go look it up.

4. “which is clearly defamatory of {name removed}.”
The post is NOT “clearly defamatory.” IT IS CLEARLY AN OPINION PIECE, you dolts! No one reading my blog would suspect that the hospital’s actual intent was to do murder, and I have every right to state my opinion, even ON THE INTERNET, about experiences with any businesses, yes, even hospitals. (Hello! Read the Constitution lately?)

I’m especially pissed off because I want that post in my archives even more than I want to post “negative” stuff about {name removed}. This blog is my diary, I’ve been writing in it for years, and I want it intact. That’s why I had my lawyer contact them to let them know I’d already {1} removed their name from the post, {2} had the cached version deleted from Google, {3} deleted Penny’s comments, and {4} put no-follow in the meta tags, all in an effort to comply with their desire to hide my totally constitutional opinion from search engines.

In effect, I bent way the hell over backwards for the incompetents who let me bleed for over an hour in their e-room to comply with their totally non-legal demand that my opinion be wiped off the ‘net because they simply did not LIKE it. Were they happy? NOOOO, they were too low tech to understand what I’d done for them, and the bossy little creeps had to have the post DELETED. And it’s not like I have the budget to launch a constitutional court case. Scylla and Charybdis.

This stupid letter caused Rackspace to give me (by way of Keef) 24 hours to comply before they’d turn off the server. Apparently any ol’ letter from any ol’ lawyer – legal or not – makes them ask, “How high?”

Nevertheless – the post is gone. And now there’s a big goddamned hole in my pregnancy archives and I’m PISSED. (Do you have any idea how many women hit all my old miscarriage posts in a week? Do you have any idea how comforting it is to read the blogs of women who have already been through whatever it is that you’re going through when you type “loss of pregnancy symptoms” into a search engine late at night?)

Before, I was just someone who had had a bad experience with them. NOW, I’M AN ENEMY. I will tell my friends bad things about them. Oh yes I will. I will say, “Don’t go there if you need medical help! Drive to the next county!”

—
This post is clearly NOT defamatory within the meaning of Iowa defamation law. This post is neither malicious nor damaging. It is factual and accurate and contains my opinions. If it comes up in search engines, that’s because THE SEARCH ENGINE WORKS.