This is a tiktok from the med mal attorney who speaks candidly about a multi million dollar case he won:
https://www.tiktok.com/@jdegasperis_esq/video/7487752508002094379?_t=ZP-8vQemNDxUpq&_r=1
From what I can gather between his tiktok and some of his responses to the comments:
45F goes to hospital in AM for an elective thyroidectmy for hyperthyroidism. No complications. She is brought to PACU where she waits 5 hours for a bed on the floors to befome available.
When a bed becomes available, she begins transport up to the 5th floor, presumably a surgery or Gen med floor. In the elevator, she experiences respiratory distress. On arrival to the 5th floor nursing station and before she is in a room, a code blue is called on her.
The responding physician, a hospitalist, examines her and orders for transfer to ICU which is on 3rd floor.
The patient is intubated in the ICU and it's discovered she had a hematoma at the surgical site compressing her airway. She ultimately suffers anoxic brain injury and paralysis.
The lawsuit takes 3.5 years. She passes away in 7 years.
The only physician found to be negligent was the hospitalist who responded to the code blue. The attorney argues he should have stabilized the patient at the nursing station prior to sending her to the to the ICU.
This is interesting because I feel we rarely hear these cases from the side of the plaintiff attorney. We do a lot of retrospective reviews here, but we dont really get to hear the attorney tell it from their point of view. So thats one reason I wanted to post this up.
The second reason is to ask what we thought about the opinion. I'm not sure how they expected a hospitalist to stabilize a critical airway at a nursing station. I doubt they were trained to intubated or do cricothyrotomy. How could the hospitalist have been less negligent here?
EDIT: this post is a goldmine for emergent management of this complication. Thank you for all the great info. When these terrible things happen, then best we can do is learn as much as possible from them.