Anybody have experience in this field or can give some insight?
TLDR: broken catheter left in body and passed through heart.
Recently my dad got very sick with temps up to 104° and was admitted to the hospital. They couldn't figure out what was wrong with him for several days, symptoms looked exactly like Lyme disease or RMSP and he was bitten by a baby tick 3 weeks prior.
While waiting for those cultures to come back from the lab, they ran more tests like CT scans, etc. This was over the course of 4 days in the hospital. They continued treating with antibiotics.
Through one of the scans, they found an 8 cm long, broken catheter lodged in his pulmonary artery. They rushed him to surgery immediately and removed it successfully, he went home the next day nearly 100% well again.
My dad had vericose vein surgery on his lower legs about 8 years ago. This was outpatient surgery at a specialized clinic, not a hospital. The vericose vein procedure requires this exact catheter to do what it does, it's the only catheter that's ever been in his body so it obviously came from this surgery. The catheter has a red tip on the end so the doctor knows that everything which was inserted is removed. This was entirely negligence that it was left in. The cardio thoracic surgeon who removed it said he had never seen one left in the body for any period of time. This was in there 11 years.
To put it in context, the catheter travelled from his lower leg, around the knee, up through the heart and got lodged at a Y junction prior to entering the lungs.
What kind of recourse do y'all think my dad has? He's reaching out to lawyers currently but we don't know what to do about our expectations. We don't know if any lawyers will even take his case.
TLDR: broken catheter left in body and passed through heart.
Recently my dad got very sick with temps up to 104° and was admitted to the hospital. They couldn't figure out what was wrong with him for several days, symptoms looked exactly like Lyme disease or RMSP and he was bitten by a baby tick 3 weeks prior.
While waiting for those cultures to come back from the lab, they ran more tests like CT scans, etc. This was over the course of 4 days in the hospital. They continued treating with antibiotics.
Through one of the scans, they found an 8 cm long, broken catheter lodged in his pulmonary artery. They rushed him to surgery immediately and removed it successfully, he went home the next day nearly 100% well again.
My dad had vericose vein surgery on his lower legs about 8 years ago. This was outpatient surgery at a specialized clinic, not a hospital. The vericose vein procedure requires this exact catheter to do what it does, it's the only catheter that's ever been in his body so it obviously came from this surgery. The catheter has a red tip on the end so the doctor knows that everything which was inserted is removed. This was entirely negligence that it was left in. The cardio thoracic surgeon who removed it said he had never seen one left in the body for any period of time. This was in there 11 years.
To put it in context, the catheter travelled from his lower leg, around the knee, up through the heart and got lodged at a Y junction prior to entering the lungs.
What kind of recourse do y'all think my dad has? He's reaching out to lawyers currently but we don't know what to do about our expectations. We don't know if any lawyers will even take his case.
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