The second alteration was attempted and failed.

At 9:40 on the Sunday morning — eight hours after my daughter came out of an operating room — a member of the hospital district board in Jasper County telephoned the pediatric unit at the hospital in Tyler and asked to speak to someone about the Alvarado admission.

I know this because that hospital logged the call, escalated it to its compliance office within the hour, and produced a two-page memorandum about it, which is exactly what a hospital with a functioning compliance department does and which is why nobody should ever telephone one.

Nothing in my daughter’s chart was ever changed by anybody.