People magazine last week reported on a husband’s reaction to his wife’s death at a surgery center.
The outlet writes that a 48-year-old woman underwent a 10-hour surgery at a plastic surgery center. She stopped breathing the next day, was revived with CPR, but was pronounced brain-dead.
The patient had lost significant weight thanks to a GLP-1 medication, and sought a surgical solution for her excess skin. Writes People, “She was seeking out a slew of procedures, including a Brazilian butt lift, brachioplasty and breast augmentation. Eager to complete her transformation, [she] interviewed multiple doctors with the request of having all of the procedures done at once — but they each turned her down.”
Finally, a Houston surgeon she found on social media agreed to conduct six procedures on her in one day at a surgery center for $53,000. She traveled from her home in North Carolina to Texas to have the procedures performed last August, while her husband was on a previously scheduled trip.
According to a petition filed by the husband and his attorney in Texas, the ASC’s records contained two anesthesia records, with a “revised” record showing that vasoactive agents used to artificially increase and maintain blood pressure were started and never discontinued. The patient’s blood pressure, according to People, fell from 130/70 to 90/60 within three hours “while being artificially maintained by the vasopressors.” Hours later, while still on the table, her body temperature had dropped from 98.96 degrees Fahrenheit to 90.32, according to the filing. People adds that the patient “lost a significant amount of blood during the procedure but was not given a blood transfusion, as reported in the court filing.” The petition claims the ASC “was not equipped to offer a transfusion.”
After the patient was transferred to a recovery unit, she began experiencing complications. The husband claims he was not informed of any of this as it was happening. After reaching out near the end of her surgeries for an update, the surgeon allegedly told him that his wife was in recovery and doing well. Later that evening, however, the surgeon’s office called the husband to report that his wife “was experiencing low blood pressure, but, he claims, they assured him that it was not uncommon,” writes People. The next day, doctors called to tell the husband that his wife was having difficulty breathing, leading him to cut his trip short to fly in and be with his wife. During his journey, he was told his wife, after having been revived “several times,” was brain-dead. He granted them permission to stop trying to revive her.
When the husband arrived in Houston, the surgeon called him and placed blame on the anesthesiologist, he told People.
In March, the husband filed a lawsuit against the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, the ASC and two nurses.
The patient’s anguished husband now questions the entire value proposition of ASCs. Writes People, “His hope is to bring awareness to the risk of going under the knife at ambulatory surgery centers, as such outpatient facilities have limited capabilities when it comes to emergencies.”
He told People he thought about what his wife would have wanted people to know about what happened to her. “The first thing is to bring attention to the dangers of these types of surgeries in a non-hospital setting,” he said, adding, "We’re not the experts. [Patients] don’t know the dangers, and the dangers, I don’t think, are being told to them the way they should be.”
Read the full story here.
