Every phone call feels like a battle. Every form is a trap. And that’s before things get dangerous.

Michael Dunston wants one simple thing: to survive the American healthcare system long enough to get a new wheelchair. What he doesn’t expect is that filing a routine insurance request will drop him into a spiraling circus of incompetence, bureaucratic obstruction, and quiet cruelty.

When Carol, a brilliant medical researcher and Michael’s closest ally, dies under suspicious circumstances, he becomes the reluctant keeper of her unfinished research at the cutting edge of medicine. Instead of answers, he discovers a tangle of corrupted institutions, disappearing evidence, and officials who seem more committed to protecting systems than saving lives.

Darkly funny, painfully honest, and grounded in real medical and psychological insight, Pummeled to Death by Hamburger exposes the absurdities that thrive within broken institutions. This is the story of a man caught between science and survival, trying to stay alive while the world around him mistakes incompetence for a plan.