Greedy Trial Lawyer
Lucky Lady Gets Another Patient's Triple Bypass Surgery
Category: The Latest Baddest
Talk about luck. Sandy Baumgartner just happened to have cardiovascular problems remarkably similar to those of another patient whose angiogram was erroneously used during Sandy's triple bypass cardiac surgery.
We can file this with the wrong site surgeries when, luckily, the wrong site needed surgical attention anyway. And, with the medication errors when the prescribed medication probably was not that important to the patient.
Patient sues after film of another heart used in bypass operationWith her body still aching from triple bypass surgery, Sandy Baumgartner lay in a hospital bed talking with a nurse about her care. In the same room at Memorial Medical Center, her surgeon was talking with her husband about something unusual that had happened during the surgery a few days earlier.
Her husband, Gary Baumgartner, couldn't believe what he was hearing. The surgeon said he had operated on his wife while using a different patient's angiogram films.
The surgeon, Dr. Lit Fung of Modesto, told Gary Baumgartner he had sensed something was wrong near the end of the surgery and went to the catheterization lab, where he learned the mix-up had happened. Before the surgery, a hospital employee had loaded the angiogram films of a different patient into the operating room computer.
"He said that he threw a fit in the lab," Gary Baumgartner recalled. "I'm just flabbergasted. I'm thinking, 'It can't be.'"
He said Fung tried to reassure him that his wife's heart was very similar to the other patient's and that she should be fine.
Sandy Baumgartner, 58, of Turlock, said the hospital's risk management director came to her room later and said the same thing, that her coronary arteries were remarkably similar to the other patient's.
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