Failure to Diagnose Leads to Medical Malpractice Lawsuit
A surgeon’s failure to recognize a surgical patient’s dangerously low hemocrit and hemoglobin levels prior to surgery and their subsequent further drop during surgery led to his death, according to a malpractice lawsuit filed in Ohio.
According to the decedent’s sons who filed the lawsuit, “The father had a left heart catheterization in June and as a consequence of the results, decided to have elective surgery for a coronary artery bypass grafting. The lawsuit stated that as a direct result of the cardiac catheterization procedure, the man sustained an injury to his right femoral artery. This caused a retroperioneal hemorrhage that the doctor did not diagnose and repair.
In fact, nothing was done about the issue even as the surgery was underway. This was in spite of the fact the patient’s hemocrit and hemoglobin levels were dropping; levels that were low even prior to surgery. These low levels were red flags that the doctor did nothing about. As a result of this failure to diagnose the right femoral artery injury, the plaintiff lost a large volume of blood.”
Making matters worse, the patient was actually given a blood thinner causing even more significant blood loss. According to the plaintiff’s lawyer, the doctor was negligent in not recognizing the blood loss as life threatening and attempting to find its source and stop it before loss of life.
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