Real Surgical Dangers

Dec 22, 2010

 My daughter's mother and I have been preaching this for two years.  Our beautiful 31-yr-old daughter was taken from us in an instant due to the infection--peritonitis--that is caused by a leak at the site of surgery, and her surgeon would not listen.  She had been in and out of the hospital 13 times in 18 months and he refused to let another doctor see her, and of course, no one would without his permission.  She was last hospitalized in December of 2008 and die  two weeks later suddenly on January 3, 2009.  The last comment her surgeon made to us as he ran his fingers through his long greasy hair was, "I know there is nothing wrong with my surgery."  Our daughter was a RN-BSN!  She hurt from the moment she awoke from the surgery until the day she died.  She lost five jobs because of absenteeism and none of her bosses would listen to her.  In Texas, due to tort reform in laws covering malpractice, we could not sue because she would have had to die within 24 to 48 hours after release from the hospital for the good (sarcasm) doctor to be held responsible.  All we wanted was to be able to set up a scholarship fund at her university for nursing students.  We were not looking to get rich from the demise of our baby. 

It’s about time someone takes this on with the media to help us get national attention to wake up the doctors and families this surgery destroys.  Doctors are running obese people through like cattle so they can get rich.  In  East Texas, where we are, the surgery gets him about $15,000 per surgery and he completes about 15 per week.  You do the math.  Our only recourse so far is that he and the hospital are still under investigation by the Texas Medical Board due to our complaint.  And this is taking forever. 

I have contacted Oprah, The Doctors and Dr. Phil about getting us on a show to help get badly needed attention to make the FDA (or whomever) take matters into hand and create a “standard of care” for this surgery.  So far to no avail.  Also, due to the lack of standard of care, this surgery is hard to make the doctor take responsibility for his actions.  Although, research shows that many great doctors complain about the bad ones because they admit that there is NO excuse for a doctor to refuse to go back into the surgical site and look for leaks – which our daughter did have once as indicated by a MRI or Scan –but he only gave her antibiotics.  These responsible doctors admit that the sites can and do become leaks and they can be repaired by several different methods including new sutures or staples and there is a glue of some kind available to aid the doctor in stopping the leaks. 

Please, join us and help us get the attention this serious surgery requires.  Help us get it to a standard of care so greedy doctors will stop and warn the patients more than, “this is major surgery,” as many of them tell their patients.  The real shame here is that she went in for a lap band; the greedy doctor talked her into a gastric bypass. 

Al Massey

 

0 Comments