Articles Posted in Hospital Negligence

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Disha Mookherjee was in her first pregnancy at age 30.  She was seeing the defendant, OB/Gyn physician Elizabeth Nye, M.D., for her prenatal care. Disha was also a physician — a cardiology fellow at Rush University Medical Center. Because Dr. Nye had concerns regarding low amniotic fluid and abnormally slow fetal growth, Dr. Nye referred Disha to a specialist in maternal/fetal medicine. That doctor recommended induction of labor at 39 weeks gestation.

Dr. Nye followed this recommendation and at 39 weeks, Disha was admitted to Rush for induction on May 5, 2008. 

Labor progressed slowly until it was complete. Disha began pushing at 4:45 p.m. on May 6, 2008. At 5:30 p.m., Dr. Nye used a vacuum extraction device in an attempt to facilitate delivery. There were three “pop-offs” (sudden detachment of the vacuum device from the baby’s head). 

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A baby born at Holy Cross Hospital in June 2008 died three days after being discharged in apparent good health. A lawsuit was filed following the death of this baby because before she was discharged, she had been examined twice by the defendant pediatrician who noted that she had a normal anus and normal genitalia. However, the first two nurses who saw the newborn allegedly chose not to perform a visual inspection of the baby’s anal area, which is a deviation from the standard of care.

Just 16 days after the child’s birth, she was rushed to the University of Chicago Comer Children’s Hospital in cardiac arrest.  It was discovered then that she had been born without an anus and was diagnosed with a congenital defect in which the child had no anus, no vaginal orifice and no urethral orifice and only a single perineal orifice in which she was passing stool and urine. 

An emergency surgery was performed the same day but because of the delay in diagnosis of the defect, the child suffered bowel obstruction, which led to a dead gut and abdominal compartment syndrome. The baby died five hours after the surgery; she was survived by her parents and a sister. The family’s lawsuit claimed that if the newborn’s condition had been correctly diagnosed during her birth admission at Holy Cross, she would have undergone a colostomy within 24-48 hours of birth to prevent the bowel obstruction and that would have been followed by a reconstruction surgery within her first year.

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