Articles Posted in Surgical Errors

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Any time a patient undergoes a surgical procedure, doctors warn us of the various risks and complications that could result from the surgery. Yet what duty do physicians have to be prepared to handle the potential complications of a surgical procedure? Are they excused from medical negligence if a patient dies as a result of a known complication of surgery? Or do they have a duty to do everything in their power to try and beat the odds and save the patient?

Take for instance the facts surrounding the Illinois wrongful death lawsuit of Estate of Abraham Pinarkyil v. Resurrection Medical Center, et al., No. 07010009. The case involves the death of a 45 year-old man who died after undergoing surgery to remove a benign tumor in his heart. Even though the man’s tumor was benign, the surgery was necessary because even benign tumors can be life threatening by impairing heart function and blood flow.

The heart tumor was removed at Resurrection Medical Center and immediately following the surgery there were signs of problems. Instead of having improved cardiac function following the removal of his benign tumor, Mr. Pinarkyil began to experience cardiac abnormalities. These abnormal heart symptoms should have alerted the medical staff that he was possibly going into shock.

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Chicago plaintiff Fahineh Jalalipour received a $1.27 million jury verdict in her Cook County surgical negligence lawsuit, Fahineh Jalalipour v. Farhad Saed, M.D., 07 L 14120. The medical negligence centered around a routine bladder surgery that the 50 year-old elected to undergo in an attempt to correct her urinary incontinence. However, as sometimes happens when medical malpractice is involved, the cure was worse than the original ailment – Ms. Jalalipour was left with painful urination and bleeding, which was only corrected after the plaintiff underwent additional surgeries.

The medical malpractice involved a routine bladder suspension surgery that was meant to correct Ms. Jalalipour’s urinary incontinence by adjusting the location of the bladder in her abdomen and relieving pressure from the pelvic floor. The surgical procedure was performed by Dr. Farhad Saed at Thorek Memorial Hospital, who reported no complications following the surgery. However, in the days following the surgery, Ms. Jalalipour immediately reported finding blood in her urine and experiencing severe pain.

While Dr. Saed dismissed Ms. Jalalipour’s problems as a simple infection, the pain and bleeding did not respond to antibiotics. Eventually, Ms. Jalalipour was forced to consult two additional urologists, both of whom investigated internal causes for her pain. Ms. Jalalipour underwent two different cystoscopies, a diagnostic procedure that investigates the insides of one’s lower urinary tract, which would include the bladder. On her second cystoscopy, which took place over a year after her routine bladder surgery was performed, the urologist discovered the presence of three sutures sewn inside of her bladder.

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A large settlement was reached in a Cook County surgical error lawsuit involving a corrective spinal surgery. The medical malpractice arose as a result of improper monitoring during the patient’s post-operative care and poor communication between the nursing and medical staffs. A settlement of $18.75 million was reached in Francisco Contreras and Sandra Contreras v. Thorek Memorial Hospital, et al., No. 07 L 7771.

The injured party, Francisco Contreras, required a spinal surgery as a result of a work injury he’d sustained about a year before. While working at a Chicago Walgreens store, the 55 year-old injured his neck while removing a printer from a shelf. In an attempt to cure the persistent neck pain that continued to radiated down Contreras left arm, his doctors recommended he undergo cervical disc surgery.

Mr. Contreras presented to Thorek Memorial Hospital for that cervical disc surgery and hopefully cure the pain he’d been experiencing since his work injury. By all accounts the surgery itself went very well and the operative notes indicated that Contreras was able to move both his arms and legs. However, these positive signs did not continue – just forty-five minutes later the medical records indicated that Contreras’s motor functions were deteriorating.

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A Cook County medical malpractice settlement for $5 million was approved by Cook County Circuit Court Judge William B. Maddux, marking the close of the Illinois lawsuit of The Estate of Shamiran David v. Rush Northshore Medical Center, et al., No. 07 L 8444. The Chicago medical negligence lawsuit was brought by the family of a woman who suffered a brain injury in the days following her heart surgery at Rush Northshore Medical Center.

While Mrs. David’s aortic valve replacement and coronary artery bypass grafting performed at Rush Northshore Medical Center went well, it was the complications following the surgery that led to Mrs. David’s brain injury and subsequent death. The case of Mrs. David can serve as a reminder to both patients and doctors that a successful surgery alone does not guarantee a positive outcome for a patient.

Mrs. David was discharged from the hospital following her surgery and sent home. However, the 59 year-old Cook County resident began to develop complications from her cardiac surgery within a few days of her discharge. She presented to her primary care physician with complaints of difficulty breathing and chest pains.

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The Illinois Appellate Court affirmed a trial court decision to treat a defendant doctor’s response to a plaintiff’s request to admit facts as evidentiary evidence rather than a judicial admission. The legal ruling arose out of an Illinois medical malpractice lawsuit involving complications following a surgeon’s attempt to reverse a tubal ligation surgery, Migdalia Serrano v. Carlos A. Rotman, M.D., No. 1-09-2028.
In her surgical malpractice lawsuit, the plaintiff, Migdalia Serrano, alleged that the defendant doctor, Carlos Rotman, M.D., negligently chose not to administer Factor IX, a coagulation factor, before and after her tubal ligation surgery. The plaintiff’s lawsuit alleged that the failure to administer the coagulation factor resulted in an infected hematoma. The Cook County jury trial resulted in a verdict in favor of the defendant surgeon, which the plaintiff then appealed.

At the center of the plaintiff’s appeal was that Dr. Rotman had been aware that Serrano was a hemophilia carrier, which would have made her more susceptible to developing a hematoma. Serrano alleged that Rotman chose not to administer Factor IX despite knowing about her heightened risk for infection. Moreover, the plaintiff alleged that as a result of the surgical malpractice, she suffered from additional medical complications that would not have occurred had she been given the Factor IX prior to her surgery.

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A Cook County medical malpractice lawsuit received a jury verdict of $1.1 million against the defendant hospital. The case revolved around the medical negligence of a Cook County hospital, which led to need for several additional surgeries for the 60-some year-old plaintiff.

In 2006, the plaintiff was a patient at Northwest Community Hospital, where she had recently undergone a knee replacement surgery. In her second day of recovery following her surgery, the plaintiff fell while using the bedside commode in her hospital room.

Considering that the plaintiff had just had a knee replacement surgery, she was at risk for falls and should have had a plan of care in place that would prevent such falls from occurring. Upon investigation, it seemed that the plaintiff did in fact have such a plan of care in place – her physician had written an order stating that the plaintiff needed her knee immobilizer on and required two people to assist her when using the bedside commode.

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Prior to the 1980s, the risk of transmitting HIV through transplanted organs was fairly high, at a time when even blood transfusions put patients at risk for contracting the deadly virus. However, in 1985, HIV antibody testing became available, which enabled doctors and medical staff to test to see whether organs were infected with HIV. Therefore in today’s medical climate it is unlikely that an organ transplant recipient would receive organs infected with HIV.

However, in 2007, four Chicago patients were found to have transmitted HIV by way of their transplanted organs. While the transplant surgeries were done at three different Chicago Hospitals, each of the four patients received organs from the same organ donor. At the time of the transplant surgery the donor was not known to be infected with HIV. His organs passed the standard tests for HIV antibodies; however, those tests could not have detected HIV if the donor acquired the infection within a few weeks of his death.

Critics of the way these 2007 transplant surgeries were handled argue that a nucleic acid test could have detected the HIV infection earlier. However, the nucleic acid test was not approved by the FDA until 2009 and even today is not effective 100 percent of the time; too many false positives make the nucleic acid test unreliable as an universal screening tool.

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An Illinois jury entered an Illinois medical malpractice verdict of $5.1 million against an Illinois surgeon and surgical center who failed to diagnose a perforated bowel sustained during pelvic surgery. The plaintiff in Gwendolyn Tate v. Dr. Harrith M. Hasson and The Surgery Center at 900 North Michigan Avenue LLC, 10 L-2437. developed a severe case of sepsis and was left a quadriplegic.

Ms. Tate had been treating with the defendant, Dr. Hasson, for chronic pelvic pain and uterine fibroids, which are non-cancerous growths in the uterus. Dr. Hasson, a practicing obstetrician, endocrinologist, and surgeon, recommended that the plaintiff undergo a surgery to treat her pain and symptoms.

In 2002, Ms. Tate underwent the recommended surgery at Surgery Center at 900 N. Michigan Avenue, LLC.. During the procedure, Dr. Hasson accidently perforated the plaintiff’s bowel. While the perforated bowel might not have been medical malpractice on its own, the failure to recognize that the organ had been perforated was an example of surgical negligence. Patients should be monitored for signs of bleeding and infection following any type of surgery; a failure to do so is below the standard of care.

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An Illinois jury found in favor of the defendant doctor in the Illinois medical malpractice lawsuit of The Estate of Eileen Olson, deceased v. Dr. Joseph F. Pensabene, Rockford Cardiology Associates, Ltd., 06 L-73. The medical malpractice case revolved around allegations against the defendant cardiologist of committing surgical errors and negligence which led to the wrongful death of the 68 year-old woman.

In 2004, Ms. Olson was admitted to St. Anthony Hospital under the care of her cardiologist, Dr. Pensabene, for the removal of a blood clot that was blocking the circulation in her left arm. The decedent had pre-existing conditions of asthma, diabetes, and hypertension. Dr. Pensabene performed an angiogram, which is a type of x-ray that uses both dye and fluroscopy to record a patient’s blood flow through their arteries and veins.

When performing Ms. Olson’s angiogram, Dr. Pensabene used a SmartNeedle catheter with an ultrasonic tip. There was no problem with the catheter entering the decedent’s body via her femoral artery and passing through her groin. It was when the catheter entered the areas of the left brachial and radial arteries that Dr. Pensabene identified the large blood clot.

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A Chicago medical malpractice lawsuit involving allegations of a botched surgery returned a verdict of $2,350,000 in Smola v. Jeffrey M. Sheedy, D.O., 05 L-4862 (IL Cook County). The plaintiff accused the defendant Dr. Sheedy of committing surgical errors, including severing his ulnar nerve during a tendon reattachment surgery, which resulted in Smola’s permanent complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS).

While at work as a maintenance mechanic for UPS, plaintiff James Smola tore his left distal biceps tendon. Smola was referred to Dr. Sheedy, an orthopedic surgeon, who recommended a tendon reattachment procedure that was performed at St. James Hospital – Olympia Fields and was the subject of the present Illinois medical malpractice lawsuit.

At the Chicago jury trial, the plaintiff alleged that Dr. Sheedy had violated the medical standard of care when he severed the plaintiff’s ulnar artery during the tendon reattachment procedure, which led to his subsequent median nerve damage and CRPS. Furthermore, plaintiff’s attorneys alleged that the surgical errors were in part due to Dr. Sheedy’s negligence in choosing not to properly protect the plaintiff’s vital arteries during the biceps tendon repair.

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