8mm
Posted on 07/05/2007 11:34:16 AM PDT by Bronco_Buster_FweetHyagh
The mother of a San Luis Obispo man who died after an attempted organ donation at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center last year claims she never gave hospital officials consent to take her son off life-support and was misinformed when agreeing to the organ harvest, according to a wrongful death lawsuit.
Rosa Navarro also alleges in her June 29 civil lawsuit that a transplant surgeon misrepresented himself as her son’s doctor, an allegation the surgeon’s attorney strongly denies. She also said she agreed to the organ donation only because she believed her son had no chance of survival.
Defendants in the lawsuit — the San Luis Obispo hospital; its parent company, Dallas-based Tenet Corp.; the California Transplant Donor Network; transplant physicians Hootan Roozrokh and Arturo Martinez; and their employer, The Permanente Medical Group Inc.—are accused of assault, battery, fraud, civil conspiracy, negligence, medical malpractice and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Sierra Vista hospital on Tuesday denied any wrongdoing in the Feb. 4, 2006, death of 25-year-old Ruben Navarro.
Rosa Navarro, 54, is asking for unlimited compensation in the death of her son.
Ruben Navarro, who was dying of a rare metabolic disorder, had been on life support for four days and was expected to die. His mother agreed to donate his organs, and the California Transplant Donor Network dispatched its transplant team to Sierra Vista.
Rosa Navarro said during an interview from her Oxnard home Tuesday that when she arrived at the hospital she asked about her son’s condition. She said a hospital nurse told her to speak with the doctor.
“He came over and approached me and said I’m in charge of Ruben,” Navarro said of Roozrokh, who was part of the surgical team from San Francisco dispatched by Oakland-based Organ Transplant Donor Network.
“I asked him, ‘Doctor could you do anything for my boy?’ and he said, ‘Oh, no. Oh no… There’s nothing I can do for a patient like him.’ ”
Navarro said through sobs that Roozrokh asked her if she planned to watch him disconnect her son from life-support.
“He didn’t even ask me, ‘What do you want me to do Ms. Navarro? Do you want me to keep him on the machine or whatever?’ ” Navarro said.
Roozrokh’s attorney, M. Gerry Schwartzbach, told The Tribune on Tuesday that his client never spoke with Rosa Navarro and was not in charge of her son’s medical care.
“He did not have any conversation with her with regard to taking Ruben off the respirator. … Dr. Roozrokh was in the Bay Area,” Schwartzbach said. “I feel very bad for Ms. Navarro because she’s going through a great deal, but unfortunately someone misled her because she never met (Roozrokh) and she never spoke to him. That is absolutely clear.”
Schwartzbach said a local physician made the decision to remove Ruben Navarro from life support.
Ruben Navarro was brought into the operating room at 11 p.m. Feb. 3, 2006, and his breathing tube was removed. But he did not die within 30 minutes—the window during which organs could be harvested. He died nine hours later, according to the lawsuit.
An operating-room nurse reported that standard medical procedures weren’t followed when Navarro was taken off life support.
The lawsuit alleges Roozrokh ordered Ruben Navarro be given lethal doses of morphine and Ativan, an accusation also reported as a finding in a federal investigation by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The report showed an intensive care nurse gave Ruben Navarro 220 milligrams of morphine and 80 milligrams of Ativan.
Sierra Vista spokesman Ron Yukelson did not respond to specific allegations against the hospital.
He did say a surgeon contracted with the donor network assumed responsibility for Navarro in violation of hospital policy, which requires a doctor to be credentialed by the hospital to treat a living patient.
District attorney’s investigators have been reviewing the case since March, but have made no decision about filing criminal charges.
“It’s a very unique case. No one’s prosecuted a case like this anywhere,” Assistant District Attorney Dan Hilford said Tuesday. “The case is very complex and deals with issues that require a great deal of research and study.”
State Medical Board spokeswoman Candis Cohen said the agency is investigating Roozrokh.
Martinez, the other doctor on the transplant team, could not be reached for comment.
Yeah, the phrase “unlimited compensation” sets my spider senses a-tingling.
As long as you continue lying about what I said and what you said, I will continue to correct the record.
I did not call your bil a butcher. I did not accuse him of killing patients for their organs, or of taking their organs while they were still alive. When I said that anyone who does that is a butcher, you are the one who said that includes your bil.
because of the 1998 medicare law, anyone, regardless of whether they signed or not, is subject to their family being approached, this is to stimulate “organ donation”
any hospital that accepts medicare funds, must call the local, federally designated “organ donor” business, and let them know that they have a prospect, the hospital must report to the “donor agency” and the “donor agency” keeps tabs on the prospect
if it looks good (a good specimen) the donor agency will approach the family, organ donor card or not
i know what happened to my father, i authored a bill to combat it, and janet napalitono signed it, only 1 vote against it,
it does happen, and the lack of regulation promotes the bad things, which then by neglect, allows them to go on
my father’s bones, at the end, were worth 125K to MTF
> My mother taught me to keep my mouth shut if I couldn’t say anything nice. I don’t see anything nice about organ donation and it degrades with each one of these articles.
I have registered as an organ donor and a bone marrow donor. When I’m gone, I’ll have no more need of my innards: can’t see why some other bloke who needs ‘em shouldn’t have a second chance, with my compliments.
My guts have stood me in good stead all my life: they’re used, but in good condition. What a waste to bury them. Reuse and Recycle them, by all means.
> Wonder what our makers opinion of that is? The most sought after organs are taken from living people, even if it is on life-support.
If He didn’t intend for our parts to be reusable, He wouldn’t have created us to have plug-compatable components.
> No, but more and more, hospitals are treating everyone as an organ donor unless there is specific documentation that they are not.
I challenge that assertion. Let’s see some evidence.
> Organ transplants can be a very good thing, when done ethically; but no one should ever be killed for their organs.
It would have been a very good use of Timothy McVeigh and Tookie Williams.
Organ donation by the willing is their prerogative. This article is about the sinister harvesting of organs from unwilling donors.
While we are told that there’s no “organ market,” the truth is that many, many folks make a considerable amount of money.
Hold onto your heart.
Yeah, I mean why give away something for free that you were just going to bury in the ground, anyway? Still, you may be right and I don’t see any reason in principle why people couldn’t be paid for donated organs, blood, or whatever. The medical system, at least, is based on a (quasi-)capitalist model, and everyone else involved makes money (doctors, nurses, hospitals, medical supply companies and labs, etc), so why not the donor?
Other than corneas or maybe bones, I’d say that all organ transplants are taken from people who are still “living”, if you can call being hooked up to a dozen life-support systems living. The organs would be useless due to oxygen starvation otherwise. Your usage of the terms “butchers” and “unholy” is inflamatory and suggests that meaningful dialog with you on the subject is impossible.
Oh, it may happen occasionally, especially in some other parts of the world. It’s not something that I worry about too much, probably less so than that I might pick up a fatal infection in a hospital, which happens regularly. Doctors are just people like the rest of us, and some of them are unethical and might just do this if they thought they could get away with it. I don’t believe such doctors are anything but a vanishingly small minority.
All surgeons make a very nice living.
Families will be approached by a member of a trained hospital team, not the procurement organization. The donor agency keeps “tabs” only in the sense that time is of the essence and often they must move fast if the family wants to donate. Usually the team must fly in unless the potential donor happens to be in a city with a procurement team.
we were “approached” by the neurosurgeon, who stated “brain death”, but refused to show me the CAT scan and other relevant tests, however, right behind the neuro, was the donor network
we agreed to “organs” and those were only discussed
where they went wrong was, they got greedy, and scavenged my dad’s body before it got to the funeral home and after he left the hospital,(where we were told what had been done ), and second, they had come up against someone who tracked everything down, exposed them, and worked on passing legislation
and NO, they never apologized, in a sense they just gave us the finger and moved on
Hope you read the posts after your silly statement.
i don’t think the point here is that organ donation is a bad thing. i think any person on this thread would accept an organ if their life depended on it. the point is....organ harvesters are finding ways to get more organs, and not always in ethical ways. my husband is a medical examiner and we see quite a bit of corruption in the practices of organ harvesting agencies. not only do they not always test tissue samples for diseases, but they will also knowingly take tissues that are from diseased individuals because it will make them money. and just recently, a local woman was on life support in the hospital. her husband was pressed hard to take her off life support so that her organs could save someone else. he finally agreed under pressure, but when his wife was taken off life support with organ harvesters ready to cut, she began breathing on her own. thank goodness the husband was present because who knows what they may have decided....ie..her quality of life isn’t going to be what another’s life would be with her organ...etc. anyway, congrats on the life you’ve been given with a donated organ. the point is, there is a LOT of corruption in the process, so don’t think that just because they elongated your life that they are angels. too much money to be made.
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