Thanks for the link....
Seems the patient had Malignant Hyperthermia...very rare, but a bad actor.
There will be two questions if that was the case:
1. Was Dantrolene maintained at the surgery office or center? If they were doing general anesthetics with volatile anesthetic agents and/or Succinylcholine not having Dantrolene on hand would be absolutely wrong, and someone is going to be held accountable.
2. What steps were taken to treat the condition? MH is recognizable if one LOOKS for the symptoms AND uses proper monitoring with an awareness/suspicion to the problem.
Even if the antidote drug was on hand, a few things require mentioning...MH is so rare that most anesthesia practitioners probably haven’t seen or treated a suspected case....treatment is Dantrolene, but administering the drug is more complex than just ‘giving it’ (it comes in a powder form and takes some effort to dilute into solution for administration). Treatment of an MH ‘crisis’ is an ‘all hands on deck’ phenomenon, and some surgery centers (or in this case a Doctor’s office?) may not have sufficient personnel on hand to assist, and odds are these personnel that are on hand are most likely to not be trained in MH treatment assistance (once again, especially if it was a MD’s office vice a Surgery Center/Hospital which often run MH drills for practice).
Most people have little understanding about a medical centers capabilities, and I cannot think of a worse situation to be in than to try and treat a full-blown MH crisis in a remote plastic surgeon’s office...but then again, I would never practice in this situation or allow any family member of mine to be treated with a general anesthetic outside of a reputable and credentialled hospital or surgery center...not saying no one dies of MH in these places, but your odds of survival are MUCH greater.
What about outpatient surgery centers that are located just down the street a few hundred feet from an emergency room or even closer than some parts of the hospital are to the emergency room? That seems to be the case in the city where I live.