Anytime one has to go under anesthesia and have a surgery performed, there is anxiety related to the medical event. All surgeries have unavoidable risks, however, each patient is owed a duty of care by the medical provider, doctor and others. When a local woman went in for a gallbladder surgery, she never guessed what the outcome would be. She is now the recipient of a medical malpractice award of over $1M related to the events of her surgery.
When the patient went in to have her gallbladder removed, the doctor was to cut only the gallbladder out. Instead, she severed a wrong artery, wrong hepatic duct and the wrong bile duct. This injury cost the patient to lose out of 9 months of work and had to have reconstructive surgery to fix the surgical errors. The victim alleged that it was a failure to follow safe and proper procedure that led to the woman’s unnecessary medical malpractice injury.
This was not a slip of the hand injury, meaning the doctor accidentally cut nearby tissues or arteries. Rather, the doctor severed in the incorrect areas, multiple times. It is an issue of not applying the standard procedure correctly. The cuts were deliberate and they were incorrect.
The woman’s $1.25 million in damages goes toward the costs she incurred, lost wages and other damages related to the incident. The hope is that improper surgical procedures are not ever performed, but the truth is that on occasion they still do. There could be many other reasons to file a medical malpractice lawsuit, not just surgical errors.
