Articles Posted in In The News

A Connecticut family was awarded $1.8 million by a jury in a medical malpractice case that finally wrapped up last week.

According to records, Rebecca Simonds and her husband, Charles Simonds, brought a claim against Dr. Taylor Hotchkiss. The couple alleged that the doctor cut the wrong fallopian tube during a surgical procedure being performed on Simonds. As a result of the botched surgery, Simonds was left sterile.

In 2011, Simonds went to the hospital with pelvic pain. Doctors were unable to determine if Simonds was suffering with an infection or appendicitis. As a precaution, Simonds was given an appendectomy by another surgeon. Hotchkiss walked in to assist with the surgery and began to deal with an abscess on Simonds’ right fallopian tube.

An inmate at a state prison in Wilsonville, Oregon has filed a lawsuit against the sate, claiming that she was improperly treated for a kidney stone and, as a result, had to have a kidney removed.

Linda Anne Bond, 62, filed the medical malpractice suit, alleging negligence on the part of the medical professionals at the prison in which she is an inmate.

According to reports, while jailed in Douglas County, Bond complained of intense pain in her abdomen. Medical staff reviewed X-ray images of Bond and found a kidney stone in her left kidney. By the time she was transported to Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, she had severe pain, fevers and blood in her urine.

Your phone and what you do with it is your business, right? Wrong. That won’t be the case if lawmakers in New York have anything to do with it. A bill submitted would force any driver involved in an accident to submit their phone for testing to determine whether or not they were using it immediately preceding the accident.

Purportedly, the new “textalyzer” would not analyze any private information. Instead, it would simply look to ascertain if a driver had been using their phone in any manner prior to the accident. That is…was the driver distracted by their cell phone. Any person who refused to turn their phone over would face an immediate license suspension.

Distracted driving is one of the most dangerous habits that people have. In fact, it could be called one of the most deadly. Still, 67% of drivers admit to using their phones behind the wheel.

Imagine going to the dentist to have a tooth or two pulled only to wake up with no teeth at all. That is exactly what happened in March to Donny Grisby, a man from Indiana.

According to Grisby, he went to White River Dental with the expectation of having four wisdom teeth removed. Grisby was taken into the treatment area and his wife sat in the waiting room. After several hours had passed, his wife began asking questions.

It was then that his wife was told that all of Grisby’s teeth had been removed. She was told that the doctors were afraid that the infection from one abscessed tooth had spread, so they took all of his teeth. When she saw her husband, he was droopy eyed and unresponsive.

It can be said that it is not unusual for people to lie to cover up mistakes. While not everyone can be accused of lying, certainly, there are those among us that will not hesitate to tell a little white lie to protect ourselves. Unfortunately for doctors, lying to cover up a mistake can have dramatic effects.

Deborah Craven, a 60-year-old woman from Milford, Connecticut was scheduled for surgery. The procedure was to remove her eighth rib because of a lesion. After the operation, Craven reported to be still having pain. An x-ray taken of the area showed why: The wrong rib had been removed and metal coils had been left inside her body.

Craven was scheduled for surgery. Before that surgery could happen, however, the original surgeon on the case, Dr. Anthony Kim, told Craven that the new surgery was not due to his having removed the wrong rib, but that enough of the eighth rib had not been removed.

A mother in Pasco County, Florida is taking on the law, and not in a way that you may think. The woman has not been arrested. She is not a criminal. What she is is a grieving mother who has lost her son and is finding that she has very little recourse, if any.

According to reports, Javier Roldan, 33, was born with spina bifida. Roldan broke his leg in February and went to a Pinellas County hospital for treatment. Just six short days later, Roldan was dead. The man’s mother, Jeanette Gonzalez, says that doctors did not listen to her.

Roldan apparently became ill in the hospital. Gonzalez pointed out her concerns to doctors, but those concerns fell on deaf ears. While someone in another state may be able to file a suit for malpractice, Gonzalez cannot. Why? Because of Florida’s Wrongful Death Act.

A woman from Newark, New Jersey was recently awarded a $9 million settlement. According to The NY Post, it is the largest payout made by Health and Hospitals Corp. in the last fiscal year.

According to reports, Ebony Curry, a woman with autism, fell down a flight of stairs in 2011. She was taken to Kings County Hospital, but doctors failed to diagnose her injury. She was sent home after only being in the ER for five hours. After Curry was sent home, a radiologist noticed her spinal injury on an X-ray but did not notify the woman or her family. Curry had emergency surgery at a different hospital but is a quadriplegic today.

When it comes to Health and Hospitals Corporation, they settled more than 200 lawsuits last year. The total payout? $124 million. While the $9 million may help the woman hire the caregivers she needs, it certainly is nothing compared to having complete mobility.

A doctor in England may soon be paying for a very serious mistake. Dr. Nanikram Vaswani, employed by Broadgreen Hospital in Liverpool, performed a vasectomy on the wrong patient. He now faces the loss of his license as his “patient” deals with physical and emotional trauma.

The patient’s name has not been released due to privacy concerns. It is known, however, that the man was booked to have scar tissue removed. The surgery, scheduled in February 2014, was performed supposedly without incident. That was until the mix-up was realized. Instead of having scar tissue removed, the man lost his ability to procreate.

According to the lawsuit, neither the doctor nor a nurse realized that the wrong patient was on the table. Vaswani did not realize he had made a mistake until the surgery was over and it was too late to correct his error. Apparently, there was a backlog of patients on that fateful day, and the patient paid the price.

A 54-year-old woman in Linn County filed a medical malpractice claim against the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics to the tune of $15 million. The woman claims that a surgery she underwent caused paralysis and affected her ability to speak. She also claims she suffered other injuries her lawyers claim were debilitating.

Joyce Bohren, a full-time cook at Jones Regional Medical Center, underwent surgery in 2014. The surgery was to remove benign tumors. Prior to the surgery, Bohren had to issues with her motor skills, vision or speech. It was after she woke up that the problems began.

The lawsuit claims that surgeons cut Bohren’s middle cerebral artery during the operation. The cut caused a stroke and Bohren was left paralyzed on the right side of her body. She was unable to control her bowel or bladder function, was unable to swallow and could not speak. As a result of the mishap, Bohren requires around-the-clock care.