The Cowboy | Screwed Over | S5-E3

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“Please note, this episode contains references to suicide.”

If you or someone you know needs support, there are links in the show notes to resources. It was nighttime at West Park Hospital in Cody, Wyoming. Julie Mossbacker said at the nursing station updating a patient's vitals. She pulled an ACG strip from the printer and got up to grab some paper. And out of the corner my eye, I watched my chair kind of mows the off.

Now, any other nurse might have shrunk their shoulders and grabbed another chair, but not Julie.

I'm kind of territorial on some of my equipment.

I'll be quite honest, I'll chase the doctor down to get my pen back. The suspect wasn't exactly hiding. A doctor sat nearby.

“When she hadn't met before, flipping through patient notes.”

He was dressed to the nine like he was going out somewhere. It was wearing a swanky leather jacket, a dress shirt, jeans, and on his feet, high-end cowboy boots. Boots that you knew were not just off of the shelf at the boot barn. You know, they were either handmade or something. Julie stared right at him.

If Dr. Schneider noticed, he didn't show it. Being the ICU nurse that I know, I said, "Excuse me, why did you take my chair?" He said, "Well, I needed it. You weren't using it." I said, "Yes, I was. I just stood up to get a piece of paper." And I needed it now, so I can finish putting my strips on.

This is now you can use it when I get done. Of course, that made my blood boil. Dr. Schneider kept flicking through his notes. Why don't you use this chair, and I brought him a different chair. It was much lower to the ground.

And he said, "No, this one's comfortable." After a while, Schneider got up and headed down the hall, seemingly oblivious to Julie, or what she was saying to herself. Who the hell did he think he was? And what planet did he land from?

Those were the cleaned up versions, by the way. If Dr. Schneider left a lasting impression on Julie, the same can't be said of her. Via his lawyer, Dr. Schneider told us he does not recall this nurse. But Julie says she remembers, because to her that first meeting was a glimpse of what was to come. Working with Schneider was going to be anything but simple.

In fact, the more she saw him around the hospital, the more she became convinced that his personality wasn't just difficult. You know, and I've worked with a multitude of neurosurgeons through my career. They're all little quirky, but he was not only arrogant, but Godlike. He wanted his ego stroke.

John Schneider had always been self-assured.

It was a quality that had once marked him out as a rising star who'd even made the pages of Reader's digest. But now some of his patients were waking up from surgery and reporting immense pain. They'd filed lawsuits. One of them, Tom Dealing, had died. Still, Dr. Schneider was adamant that he'd done nothing wrong. But once Dr. Schneider left Montana and set up permanently in Wyoming, those allegations followed him, like a dust cloud, over the border.

And as patients and doctors tried to challenge or defy Dr. Schneider, they noticed that strange things began to occur.

“After all, what happens when you try to convince someone who has supreme confidence in his abilities that he's made a mistake?”

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This is episode three. Screwed over.

When Christy McCackern and her mom, Mary Wilkinson, first met Dr. Schneider in Billings, Montana, they really took a shine to him.

My mom loved him. She liked to talk a lot and she would go into a doctor's appointment, she would just talk and talk and he could tell some people like our too busy for this. He made the time.

“He would sit and have very long conversations with my mom and talked to her and make her feel special, make her feel like she was important to him.”

At the time, Mary was 64 years old. She had raised Christy and her brother single handedly. She was a nurse at a long-term care home. A job she loved so much, she would also volunteer on weekends, organizing hotels for the residents. It became so popular that the news station came out.

We would have hundreds of people coming from the town just to come see her. Everybody loved her.

But in 2006, Mary started experiencing back pain. She had already had surgery twice before she ended up in front of Dr. Schneider.

“Christy says he seemed confident he could help.”

He made promises of making her feel better and this was nothing he was going to fix her. She was going to get up to dancing again and filling better. But after two operations to fuse Mary's spine together with bolts and screws, she was still no closer to feeling better. She just kept saying that the pain was getting worse and it would go down her leg. My mom was tough so I knew something wasn't right. So when the summer of 2008, Christy took her mom back for another consultation.

As soon as Dr. Schneider walked into the room, Christy felt something was off. He completely changed. He took the X-rays and he slapped him up on the wall. And he said, "Look, the fusion is perfect. Everything has healed. Perfect. I don't know what's going on."

“Everything looks great in here. He said, "The only thing that's wrong is there's some nerve entrapment from scar tissue that he said he had no control over."”

And he could not operate on that. He didn't scream it but it was very intense. I don't know what you want me to do. Everything's fine. It's healed. It's perfect. I did a great job. He was very annoyed with us like we were wasting his time. Then Christy says, "Dr. Schneider said something that stopped her short. If she ever has surgery, it will paralyze her. So don't take that route. Don't trust anybody that says they're going to be able to fix her because it's not going to happen." Dr. Schneider's words hit Christy Hard. The idea that her mom was a lost cause was hard to stomach.

What do you do? You've got a neurosurgeon telling you, basically, your mom's life is going to always be like this.

And there's nothing you can do. In the months after, she watched as her mom began to unravel. She was miserable. She was in so much pain. She couldn't stand it. Eventually, Dr. Schneider did suggest a new approach. A spinal cord stimulator. It's a device that can help with pain by sending electrical signals down the spinal cord. But it didn't help. We went in to see her primary care doctor and asked him if he would send a letter to Schneider.

If there was any possible way that he could see her and Schneider wrote back and said, "No, there's nothing I can do for." He wanted nothing more to do with her. He would not see her. So they struggled on until one day, Christy's phone rang. It was her mom.

The rims are a stretch of sheer cliffs overlooking buildings. She couldn't take the pain. Christy find me a surgeon just paralyzed me. At least I'll be out of pain. And that scared me really bad. That really, really scared me. Not just saying that she didn't want to be alive but saying she wanted to drive her car off the rims. Like a plan. That was it for Christy. Whatever Dr. Schneider had said, she had to do something.

So she left a message with another neurosurgeons' practice in Billings. The answer came back quickly. They called me back one of the nurses and told me that he is not taking any of Dr. Schneider's old patients. There are current lawsuits from Dr. Schneider and they just can't take that risk.

It was the first time Christy had ever heard anyone say anything negative about Dr. Schneider.

“It really had no clue what was going on. It made no sense to me, to be honest. Okay. What is he done?”

They wouldn't tell me. In fact, the more Christy searched, she says it seemed to her like nobody was willing to take on one of Dr. Schneider's patients. I called a lot of Doctors in town. I would say, who she has surgery with, what's going on? And I couldn't even get an appointment for her. They wouldn't even look at her ex-rays or MRIs. They wouldn't do nothing. Nothing.

Christy was running out of options. Maybe Dr. Schneider was right. Nobody could help. But then Christy remembered someone. A Doctors should once worked with, and she made one last call. Her nurse told me about Dr. Narotsky down in Wyoming.

“Christy didn't think twice. I called Dr. Narotsky up, and I talked to the nurse right away.”

And she's like, yeah, we've seen a few other patients that Dr. Schneider did surgeries on. She ended up sending me to the office to send an appointment to come down. So Christy and her mom made the long drive down the cast for Wyoming, where Dr. Narotsky was based. When they were called in, he sat at the edge of the exam table. He was in his 60s, tall, and wierry, and he began to lay it out for them. I would go over the films with them and say, here's the problem.

And then he told them what it meant.

We're going to have to do surgery. We just need to fix the fusions that never healed. None of them healed.

Christy was speechless trying to take it all in.

“I said the first surgery from Dr. Schneider. He said, no, none of the hardware has healed none of it.”

And I'm picturing it in my head. All these screws and bolts in my mom's back just floating around. And I asked him, I said, so my mom was walking around with a broken back, all this time. He said, yeah, none of it's healed. My mom didn't say anything. She was just listening in shock. Dr. Narotsky was clear that there were no magic fixes.

The best he could do was to remove the hardware and fuse her spine for a third time.

My brain was just going at every witch direction. Like, do we trust this doctor, seniority doing? And there was one question in particular that was weighing on her mind. The thought that Dr. Schneider had planted in her head. I asked him if this is going to paralyze my mom.

I still believed that he was right, Dr. Schneider, and anybody that touched her was going to paralyze her. There was nothing to be done. Dr. Narotsky told her that wouldn't happen. He wasn't pushy at all. He said, think on it, get back to me. Let me know what you think. Kristi walked out of Dr. Narotsky's office relieved. Finally, she found someone willing to take on one of Dr. Schneider's patients.

But as she took her mom and her two toddlers back out of the building and into the parking lot,

I got the kids and my mom in the truck, and I walked around the parking lot, so they wouldn't hear me. She pulled out her cell phone and punched in the number for the office of Dr. Schneider. I asked to speak to him. He wouldn't take the call, so I told the secretary to give him a message for me. I told her I wanted to hear it from Schneider that he lied to us all these years. That my mom had a broken back. This is walking around with hardware that's not even connected to her bones.

“And I wanted to hear it from him. What his thoughts are?”

Did he know all these years that my mom's fusion didn't heal, but he put her through so much pain and agony? And I remember a few of the people in the parking lot looking at me, because I was screaming on the phone, demanding him to get on the phone and talk to me and tell me what he thinks of this. She just kept saying he's too busy, he's with patients he cannot come to the phone, but I'll be sure to tell him. A week later, her mom got a letter. It was from Dr. Schneider. He wrote, "I was a guest that your daughter would intimate and accused myself or my staff of medical error or ignoring your needs."

He went on with the warning for her.

I am very concerned you chose Dr. Narotsky for your second opinion and would encourage you to be very, very careful before believing or letting this doctor treat you.

I would be happy to sit down with you and your family and review these issues.

“As she scanned through the words, Christy could only think one thing.”

What an asshole? At that point, he doesn't want any other surgeon to see what he did to my mom and side her back. So, Christy and her mom did not take up Dr. Schneider's offer of a follow-up appointment. Nor did she pay any attention to his warnings about Dr. Narotsky. Instead, she moved ahead with her mom's surgery. But then, not long later, a second letter arrived in the mail with the warning that made her wonder what and who she was really dealing with.

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The second letter was kind of strange and mysterious.

There was no return address and it was typed in a font that mimicked handwriting. It was signed simply, Julie. Hey, Mary, I thought about you when I heard on the radio that several lawyers and the feds are investigating that neurotsky doctor for malpractice and fraud. They say his specialty is redo surgeries when people don't need them and a bunch of doctors are suing him for fraud too.

Christy was scared.

“What if there really was a problem with Dr. Narotsky?”

We've already been screwed over once by one neurosurgeon. So when you receive a letter like that, I wanted to cancel it. So Christy gave Dr. Narotsky a call. He listened as she told him about the letter and it's claimed that he was under investigation.

To my knowledge, I've never been investigated by any of the medical organizations, societies, boards.

And then he told her something else. He said that we weren't the only person getting that letter. Another patient of his had received the same note. The letters were identical, the same words, the same computer font that mimicked handwriting.

“And just like Christy and her mom, this other letter had been sent to a former patient of Dr. Sniders.”

It's very confusing. You're just not sure who to trust. The whole thing was so bizarre. Who in their right mind sends letters when you're a neurosurgeon out to patients like that? That's just so weird.

To Dr. Narotsky, the motive seemed clear because this was not his first rodeo with Dr. Snider.

It all started some years earlier when he says a small hospital near Cody got in touch. The infection control committee was concerned because they were seeing that he was having a lot of infections. And they asked me if I would review those cases for them and give them a opinion. Was this normal for neurosurgery? Was this abnormal? And it's why I agreed to do that.

“And so, at their request, he dug into Snider's records.”

He was deeply troubled by what he found.

His infection rate was extremely high.

After Narotsky sent off his report, he thought little of it. Until patients began to turn up at his door with long and complicated medical histories all tracing back to this same doctor. I would restudity them, MRI scan, myogram, CT scan, combination of all of those things. In some cases, he says he found spinal fusions that had failed with screws separating from bone. Or in one case, even missing its target entirely.

He's put the screw in their own place, missing a pedicle by this much just it shouldn't happen. It just shouldn't happen. Another time Narotsky says Snider had operated on the left side of a patient's spine when it should have been the right. And when the patient complained, Snider denied it done anything wrong and sued the patient for defamation. That patient got an almost identical letter attacking Narotsky.

Only the signatures were different, whereas Mary got one that was signed Julie, the other one was signed Doug. So, for Narotsky, the pattern felt all too familiar. He's aware that I was honest with these patients. He goes after anybody that crosses him in any way. And he's not subtle about it. On the night before Mary's operation, Dr. Narotsky called Christy at the hotel where they were staying.

He could tell I was still scared. She stepped into the hallway to take the call, not wanting to wake her kids. Gently, he told her that he understood why she was scared and that he would do everything he could to help her mom. I wasn't going to let him get under my skin and I wasn't going to change what I was going to do, which was to take care of the patient and be honest with the patient. Christy hung out feeling better, hoping he was right. The next day, Dr. Narotsky got to work. Slowly, carefully, he removed the screws and rods that Dr. Schneider had implanted in Mary's back.

One by one, he placed him onto a surgical tray. He said about refusing Mary's spine, vertebra by vertebra. When it was all over, Christy anxiously went to the recovery room. My mom's face was all swollen from being under stomach that long. She woke up and looked at me and said the pain's gone. It's all gone. I worked at the hospital on a surgical floor. I've never heard anybody say that.

For Dr. Narotsky, the question was what to do next. He had no faith that the system would be able to deal with a doctor like Schneider.

Even if hospitals suspected that something was wrong, Dr. Narotsky didn't believe they would really do anything. Where did the problem that I've seen out west and in other rural communities? When these rural hospitals attract a neurosurgeon and these smaller hospitals were suddenly getting tremendous revenue because of the procedures that the neurosurgeon or spine surgeon was doing.

“And because the administration, I think, in some instances to look the other way and let those bad practices continue to happen.”

Medicine can be a small world and in a place like Wyoming, it's even smaller. Doctors aren't keen to call out other doctors. It puts your name and reputation on the line and it's not a step that's taken often.

But Dr. Narotsky knew what strong-armed tactics look like. He'd seen them long before he became a surgeon.

My father was a physician and I started following him around when I was probably in junior high school. They lived in a little mining town in Michigan, one of those places where the company owns almost everything. Many of his father's patients were minors who developed breathing problems. He diagnosed them with lung disease.

“And the big wigs of the mining company came to him and said stop calling it that because we have to pay a lot of compensation when you call it that.”

And he told the mining company officials where they could go and he fought the mining company. Now decades later, his son wasn't about to back down either. Dr. Narotsky gathered together the records of all the redo operations had done on Dr. Snyder's patients.

They finally put all of those cases together and I talked to the Wyoming Board of Medicine.

The Board won't confirm the details, but Dr. Narotsky says he handed over a dossier containing the records of 17 patients. Now, it was up to the authorities. But Dr. Schneider wasn't about to take this quietly because when he was challenged, he fought back. Some of the things that Schneider did is to bully and intimidate people that were trying to bring him under control to me that's a sociopath. Before Christy took her mom home from the hospital, Dr. Narotsky handed her a plastic pouch.

It contained all the hardware had taken out of her mom. There were eight thick screws in total, each several inches long. Some of the rods were bent. The side of them stayed with Christy. If she wanted to hold Dr. Schneider accountable, she would need to take him to court. To do that, she needed her mom's medical records.

So one day, Christy walked into Dr. Schneider's clinic with her young daughter and two. As she waited for the assistant to get the files, Christy held the bag of screws in her hand. I was just lightly jingling them, and one gentleman asked me, "What are those?" I said these are screws from a previous surgery that my mom had from a doctor in this office, and they had to all be taken out. And he was like, "Oh, I hope your mom's doing better now," and I was like, "Oh yeah, she's doing much better now."

As she spoke, Christy says Dr. Schneider's assistant sets silently, shuffling papers behind her desk.

“And then she told Christy, "Well, we will be getting these out to you. You don't need to wait here for them. You need to leave."”

And I said, "Well, okay. Are you going to mail them to her? Like, when can we expect them?"

Christy says she left the office without complaint, but then her phone rang. It was the police.

“And he told me that Dr. Schneider's office had called and filed a report against me,”

and he said that I, apparently, went into the office screaming on a rampage, and I took a package of screws and threw them through the receptionist's window and shattered her computer screen. It sounded surreal, but the officer told Christy that he would need to give her a no trespassing citation. He told her to stay where she was, so he could drive down and meet her.

I asked him, I said, "If I threw those screws through that window, how would I have the screws still?" And I showed him the screws that I still had. He goes, "Yeah, that doesn't make sense to me." Dr. Schneider has a different version of what happened. He sent us an account from his receptionist claiming that Christy slammed the bag on the desk, causing damage to a computer monitor. He says she was loud and disruptive and was upsetting his patients.

I'd never yelled. My voice didn't even raise. I had my daughter with me.

I wouldn't have scared her like that in there.

“When we asked Schneider about his treatment of Christy's mom, he denied harming her.”

He described Mary as, quote, an elderly obese woman with severe degenerative disc disease and previous failed back surgeries from multiple doctors. He says her ongoing pain was caused by chronic scar tissue, and that other doctors agreed, quote, "There was nothing they could do to help her." And he goes on to say, "She then found her way to the infamous Dr. Narodsky.

He, as usual, reported that all her previous surgeries were incorrectly done, not healed and needed a revision surgery. He performed all that, and the patient did not improve." But Christy doesn't see it that way. She says that Dr. Narodsky's intervention gave her mom priceless years with a better quality of life.

She could enjoy things. She got out of the wheelchair. In fact, she made me give it away immediately. She was proud of the walker after that, after being in a wheelchair. Kids would jump on it, and a little seat, and she would walk them around,

and she'd get up and dance, and this was stuff that my mom could never do before ever.

[Music] In the end, the lawsuit with Dr. Schneider was settled, like so many others, with no admission of wrongdoing. Meanwhile, the Wyoming Board of Medicine was moving ahead with its own investigation. They wanted to know not just about the accusations of medical negligence,

but also those strange anonymous letters from Julie and Doug. Dr. Schneider wrote back with a different version of events. He said that the letters were actually from Narodsky himself. He wrote, "Dr. Narodsky hired or convinced a collaborator or patient representatives to mail these letters in an effort

to misdirect this investigation." [Music] The letters from Julie and Doug were, Schneider said, all part of Dr. Narodsky's quote, "master plan" to destroy his business. A plan that involved brainwashing his word, patients and their families,

into believing that they were victims of malpractice. People like Christy and her mom. Schneider wrote, "This is a despicable, unethical, and malicious practice that reflects the core of Narodsky's personality

“and his key to his business expansion plans."”

The way Schneider describes it, Narodsky had decided that Wyoming just wasn't big enough for the both of them, and he was trying to run him out of the state.

In the end, the identities of Julie and Doug were never proven.

Dr. Schneider's complaint against Narodsky was not upheld by the Board of Medicine. When we asked the Board's executive director about it, he told us that Dr. Narodsky was a wonderful man and said that he helped them on many occasions.

As for Schneider's claim that he was a victim of professional rivalry, Dr. Narodsky says there was never any bad blood to begin with.

But Dr. Schneider would not let it go.

“As time went on, his apparent threats only escalated.”

For a while, Schneider had a blood and he used it to lash out at those he thought wronged him, calling on friends from his time in Los Angeles. My few contacts were shaded past who I saved during my time in the gangland L.A. days

have kept close watch and asked to help. I held these wolves at bay. The hounds are released and promised to visit my rivals. The list isn't too long. A few specialty doctors in Wyoming and Montana,

such as Jewel Lane in Casper.

When he heard about the blood, Dr. Narodsky knew exactly who Schneider was referring to. Jewel Lane was my home address in Casper. I don't take it lightly.

“Somebody has gone off the deep end, you know?”

I do have a concealed carry permit. After your podcasts, I will probably start carrying a gun. Meaning I wouldn't be surprised if Schneider decided to come pay me a visit. Dr. Narodsky waited to hear back from the Wyoming Board of Medicine about the evidence had given them,

but the call never came.

Not one of the 17 cases he said he handed over resulted in any action being taken.

When we approached Dr. Schneider, he told us via his lawyer that throughout his career he maintained a commitment to patient care and medical ethics. He told us he helped thousands of patients and that bad outcomes are an unavoidable risk in neurosurgery.

He says that he was the victim of underhand tactics by his competitors and adversaries who he says were motivated by "professional rivalry."

“When it comes to the malpractice lawsuits,”

he said that the majority of claims were dismissed or settled without admission of fault. And he claims that impartial panels found Dr. Schneider's care to be within the standard of practice in most cases. Though when we asked, he declined to provide evidence.

Even after Dr. Narodsky alerted the Board of Medicine, there was nothing to stop Dr. Schneider from operating. Outside the hospital, his behavior was becoming more and more erratic. He saw enemies everywhere. Dark forces that he believed were out to destroy him.

The same traits that had once made him a standout, his unshakable self-belief, and his habit of shooting from the hip, were now pushing him toward the edge. And soon, there would be a case that the authorities couldn't ignore. All of a sudden, there's something to make sure you go.

Wow, something that shocks the conscience. Oh, man, I don't know how much further your jar can drop, but this is one that just seemed to get worse and worse. That was a time war. I wish I really could have shot him. That's coming up next time.

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Join audible in the audible app, or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. Dr. Robert Nuretsky passed away in 2025. We include his story with the support of his family. This has been an audible original. I'm your host, Laura Beal.

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