Erin Vance

It’s been 6 years since the unbelievable happened to Erin Vance, but she still deals with the repercussions every day. She was waking up from a minor surgery at Mid-Columbia Medical Center, (MCMC) when she realized her doctor was using her hand to touch himself. She remembers him kissing her on the lips while she was waking from sedation.

“I had no control over what he was doing and he manipulated my hand to rub him,” Erin recalls, explaining she’s now scared of doctors and hospitals. “It makes me scared to even go to my regular doctor. I have to tamp down that panic whenever it comes up.”

Similar horrors happened to at least 12 incapacitated women before Erin’s abuser, Dr. Fred Field, a former anesthesiologist, was arrested in late July 2011.

Erin was overcome by “This deep sickness, like shame and embarrassment and nausea and panic … How did this happen? That’s not possible.”

But only through individual police investigations were lawyers able to piece together this horrific pattern of sexual abuse of multiple patients that had been going on for years with cover-up’s and denials by the hospital administration and staff members.

Erin is proud that her case and the cases of the other brave victims brought about institutional change within the medical center to focus on patient safety and to shine a bright light on this medical community’s willingness to conceal and look the other way when a medical professional does something so horrific.