Posted on 06/17/2025 10:30:53 AM PDT by AzNASCARfan
We are looking into filing a lawsuit against the hospital that my wife was just in for a month.
Let me give you her story and see if anybody has some advice for us. On Friday May 9th at 9am, I took my wife to the ER because she was having abdominal pain that we suspected was a bad appendix. By 11:30am it was confirmed that indeed her appendix was inflamed and needed to come out. My wife said well happy Mother’s Day to me and the PA responded, don’t worry this is no big deal, 3 little incisions, and it will be out and you’ll be home by tomorrow… I said I hope so because every day that she’s on her back will take her seven days to recover from with her COPD condition.
For just a little background, she was diagnosed with stage four COPD almost 11 years ago and last August she made her first trip to the hospital since being diagnosed because she had a real high heart rate for 16 hours and at that point found out that she had pneumonia and or valley fever and was also diagnosed with CHF. At the time, her heart function was at 30%. She got through that stay and by November when they did a heart function test she was up to 55%. The last pulmonary test she had for her COPD in March showed some improvement from the previous test two years ago, after we heard for years that she would never get any better. Before this bout with appendicitis, she was in the best shape she’s been in for three or four years, I would add my belief is because of the change in diet I implemented… we got rid of all the ultra processed foods and I cooked all our meals starting with fresh meat and veggies. She came out of the hospital at 97# and was up to 128# for the first time in years. She hadn’t needed her oxygen at home in almost 6 months and was even starting to help me around the kitchen again. Early afternoon on the ninth, they moved her up to an ER observation room, they called it while they were waiting for approval from the cardiologist that she could handle the surgery, they mentioned the 30% number from last August and we said no that’s not right it was 55% in November, so we waited. In the meantime, they’re putting her on morphine, alternating with OXY every two hours to help her with the pain that she’s in.
At 7 PM her sister called her cardiologist office and got an answering service. He called her right back and she laid into him as to why he couldn’t walk across the footbridge to the hospital and give her his approval, he said he had no idea what she was talking about and hadn’t gotten any notification that he needed to give this approval.
About 10pm, I went out and asked the nurse how come she wasn’t on the monitor that shows her vitals, including O2 level and heart rate? Her response was that that’s only needed if the patient has COPD. I said she has COPD and has for over 10 years now this needs to be done. We also asked her how they knew the appendix was not getting worse 12 hours after the CT scan?? They came in and hooked her up and her oxygen saturation was 83%, so they put her on oxygen. Oddly enough, some how the number that got entered in her chart was 88% instead of the 83% I saw with my own two eyes.
Early Saturday morning the PA from his office came over and talked to my wife and gave her a verbal approval. Soon after the kidney doctor came in and said that her kidney numbers were way down. We waited all day Saturday with me telling anybody that would listen that every day she is on her back will take her seven days to recover from and she needs the surgery now. By Sunday morning, her kidney function was down in the low teens and they finally had her on the schedule to do the appendectomy that afternoon. The surgery took 30 minutes and went flawless. She didn’t even have any surgical pain afterwards or need any pain meds for the first week.
Problem now was that the kidney function kept decreasing. She got down to 6% function for two days straight before she started rebounding and by then her COPD had gotten exacerbated and she was very weak. The Kidney Dr said this damage occurred because of her low BP from the morphine and oxy… he said it had gotten down as low as 70/50. I said no it actually got down to 66/40, which somehow that number missed her chart too. She hadn’t eaten anything for seven or eight days at that point.
They finally released her Saturday, two weeks later, but she got home and couldn’t catch her breath. I put the pulse ox on her and she was about 90% O2 with a heart rate of 150, we cranked her oxygen up to 5 L and waited for about a half an hour, watching the pulse ox and the oxygen number came up, but the heart rate didn’t get below 140 and we ended up calling 911, they came and evaluated her and called the ambulance who did a scoop and run and took her right back in.
I followed the ambulance back in and by the time I got in the room with her right after she got there, she was pretty much catatonic couldn’t speak or communicate with anybody who was just staring off into space. They started a new round of tests, including an arterial blood gas draw where it was determined that her CO2 level was 91%. Also a chest X-ray that showed that she had pneumonia that they had just released her with. I didn’t think she was gonna make it through the day, but thankfully she did.
She spent another three weeks in there recovering actually only two weeks recovering because they were ready to release her but only with a BiPAP machine at home to use nightly to help get rid of the CO2. That took a full week to get approved by the insurance. Initially, the insurance wanted a sleep study done by a third-party, which couldn’t happen because the hospital wouldn’t release her without the BiPAP machine being at home, we were stuck in a loop. They rewrote the orders for an NIV BiPAP that didn’t require the sleep study and we waited four more days for that. The Friday before she was released, we called her insurance company as soon as they opened and asked them what the status was on the BiPAP machine, they said it was still in medical review. I said how long can we expect that to take? She said within 24 hours. I said well this is day four so I think your three days over 24 hours. Then I called back to the grievance department and filed a grievance with them over this delay and asked how it is better business to keep paying for the hospital stay day after day than it is to pay for a simple machine that she needs to save her life. After that call I wrote a letter that I sent to every elected official I could think of starting with our senators and congressman and then I went to the state legislators, state senators, and our governor as well as four different local media outlets that do “on your side” type segments. That afternoon I got an email back from one of the state legislators saying she’d forwarded my email to AHCCCS (Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, it was our state run system until Obamacare made it Medicaid funded), and the little while after that, I got another one from Governor Hobbs office, saying pretty much the same thing. About 10 minutes after that email I got a call from AHCCCS asking me what was going on and I told them. Later that evening we got a call back from the grievance department and he tried to tell us that the machine was approved the night before and I said how could that be when nobody at your office knew it this morning, nobody at the place that was supplying the BiPAP knew it and nobody at the hospital knew it after at least 3 different people called all day Friday, he had no answer.
She was finally released again Saturday evening, and has spent a week recovering now at home where she can actually get some rest, but it’s going to be a long road to get her back where she was again, if ever… and now a BiPAP machine is a permanent part of her night. Our big thing at this point is making sure this never happens to her or anybody else again, she spent a month in the hospital over something that should’ve been outpatient if we could’ve just found a surgeon that wanted to do his job. And secondary to that why does an insurance company have that much power to override doctors orders? I mentioned that numerous times to her doctors in the final week and they said you don’t even know the half of what we deal with, that is just completely wrong!! I made numerous complaints to administration over this month detailing continuous errors that were made after the initial delay, because they were using old information and didn’t even consult with us at all before making their decision to wait. We never did get any answers as to who dropped the ball that first day. We never even got an answer as to whether it was supposed to be her cardiologist giving the approval or the cardiologist on staff that day.
The first one my daughter filed was about day five. We had administrators come in and interviewed my mom (who has a medical background) for a good half hour. She had been taking notes through the whole comedy of errors, and they wrote down four pages of notes from that interview. The next day we finally had somebody come in and explain to us that they felt like the sepsis was a lower risk than her chronic heart and lung issues. I said yeah by the time they did the surgery it sure was, but it certainly wasn’t the day that we brought her in. All we kept hearing was it’s part of the process or it’s hospital policy. Well I think those policies and processes need to be put under some outside scrutiny. At one point I remember asking them was the process they were talking about, intended to kill her. By day two I felt like it was a Medicaid bilking scheme. By day six, I felt like I was watching those Obama care death panels that we all heard about, in action…
Early on when I started talking about filing a lawsuit, I was saying it wasn’t even about money, that if we could find a lawyer to take it on contingency they could have it all, but after a month of being literally tortured there and coming out all bruised up looking like a pin cushion, I feel like she deserves something, but the lawyer could still have the lion’s share of anything they can collect, as far as we are concerned, it’s not about the money it’s about simple right and wrong and maybe a little communication would be good too!
It’s just crazy, over the past 11 years, I nursed her through 2 bouts of the flu and one of Covid where I thought she was going to die each time… I wanted to take her to the hospital each time but she would not agree… and especially with Covid because she did not want to be put on the Covid protocol… sadly the professionals could not handle a simple appendectomy without an extra month stay in the hospital.
I don’t have any lawyer advice, but I’m with you. This is terrible behavior by the hospital and its employees. There’s incompetence all around us.
My daughter’s best friend ended up with a burst appendix after she was misdiagnosed with a stomach flu last Winter. She nearly lost her life and that’s no exaggeration. She ended up having fluid build up in her lungs, and hers was very rare. So she had to wait for her lung issue to clear up before they would even attempt to remove the already burst appendix. She was in the hospital until mid April.
Malpractice everywhere, and these hospitals just get away with it.
I hope you can find someone who will take your case. It’s not about the money. It’s about being held accountable for the very obvious mistakes. No one is expecting them to be God. We do expect them to record measurements correctly, and to otherwise communicate properly.
My prayers are with you and yours.
Med mal lawyers work for free. If they take your case you have a winner. If they turn you down it was a loser. They don’t take any chances. Make an appointment and bring the medical charts and your diary.
Here is what AI says:
This is an incredibly frustrating and heartbreaking situation. What your wife went through sounds like a cascade of medical errors, poor communication, and systemic failures that turned what should have been a routine procedure into a month-long ordeal that significantly compromised her health.
Several concerning issues stand out:
**The initial delay** - A 2+ day delay for appendectomy approval, especially when you specifically warned about COPD complications from prolonged bed rest, seems problematic. The communication breakdown between departments about cardiac clearance is particularly troubling.
**Monitoring failures** - Not having a COPD patient on oxygen monitoring initially, then apparently misrecording her oxygen saturation (83% recorded as 88%) raises serious questions about care standards.
**Medication-induced complications** - If the kidney damage was indeed caused by hypotension from pain medications (dropping to 66/40), this suggests inadequate monitoring during drug administration.
**Discharge with pneumonia** - Being released with undiagnosed pneumonia that led to CO2 retention requiring emergency readmission is a significant oversight.
**Insurance obstruction** - The week-long delay for BiPAP approval, keeping her hospitalized unnecessarily, adds another layer of systemic failure.
You’re right to be angry. This does sound like it could involve multiple instances of medical negligence - from the initial delays to monitoring failures to premature discharge. The fact that she went from her best health in years to requiring permanent nighttime respiratory support suggests real harm occurred.
For legal advice, you’d want to consult with a medical malpractice attorney who can review the medical records and determine if the standard of care was breached. Many work on contingency, so initial consultations are often free. Document everything you remember and keep all medical records.
Your instinct about preventing this from happening to others is admirable - sometimes legal action is the only way to force systemic changes in hospital policies and procedures.
My wife and I went through a similar experience. They used their four-year-old records instead of our up-to-date records and insisted that that was the hospital’s policy. The staff never gave to us any indications as to what the problems were. We decided to let it go because we are simply too old to fight the system. BTW, there were no Americans nor Caucasians on the ‘staff.’ Some did not speak English, others spoke very broken English which was impossible to understand. I smelled DEI the entire times I had to be there. The other thing I noticed about the ‘staff’ is that they simply did not like to listen. I continually had to make them shut up so that my wife and I could ask questions to discover information. That was futile. In addition to all of that, it seems that that has become the ‘norm,’ and is to be expected, which is what outside PAs told me. ( ?????? )
I’m so sorry you two have gone through such an ordeal. Prayers up for you and your wife, FRiend.
No, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn.
I forgot to mention that my opinion is that it is gross incompetence on the ‘staff’ of the hospital combined with the obvious Medicare money-grab by the entire medical community. 0bembacare was a tool to give to the medical crime organizations licenses to steal and they are all adept at stealing!
Medical malpractice cases are difficult because you first have to find a physician that will testify that the care received was substandard and violated “best standards”. Physicians stick together and most are certainly not going to criticize another physician in their area.
Search for medical malpractice attorneys in your area and find one that has been in the news for winning cases.
Experience is the key. Don’t got with a hole-in-the wall attorney that thinks he knows the law and promises the moon. There are technical requirements prior to even filing a med-mal case that if not met, will cause any case to be dismissed immediately.
Advice: Medical malpractice lawyers don’t come cheap one thing about professional’s those two fields don’t like to go after each other they work hand in hand often and it could be bad for business.
Don’t expect to get it over with quickly it’s a long money game for both and your no in it.
Had that problem with my wife with mixed up medical records.
We were told that medical malpractice cases were hard to win because a) juries give the medical staff the benefit of the doubt that they are trying to help and B) you have to prove something was done or not done due to willful malice or negligence.
My husband suffered from medical malpractice but we talked to 3 different lawyers and they all said the above.
Depending on your state’s law, medical malpractice cases are very expensive from the lawyer’s perspective because of the cost of the expert witnesses (doctors of the same specialty) needed. Not only do the lawyers run the risk of losing the case and not being able to collect their (contingency) fee; they may also be tens of thousands out of pocket for experts just to get the case started.
For that reason, your likelihood of finding a lawyer willing to take the case, with the resources to do it right, is dependent on what amount of damages they think they can prove, not on how clearly the defendant screwed up.
In many areas of the law, you need a specialist, not a generalist. Definitely true in med-mal.
“We were told that medical malpractice cases were hard to win because a) juries give the medical staff the benefit of the doubt that they are trying to help and B) you have to prove something was done or not done due to willful malice or negligence.
My husband suffered from medical malpractice but we talked to 3 different lawyers and they all said the above.”
____________________________________________________________
Significant comorbidities such as COPD and CHF are often the medical malpractice defense for what is termed “a medical misadventure” are usually enough to kill any real liability.
The best approach to get what you want is to take your case to several medical malpractice lawyers and make clear from the start what you have in mind. An accommodating lawyer can arrange to get your wife's treatment and medical records evaluated by an expert. Errors and departures from the standard of care can then be pursued as damages claims and as public and private complaints to compliance units, licensing agencies, and accreditation organizations.
For ethical reasons, you may have to hire and pay a separate lawyer to evaluate, draft, and file those complaints based on the information and expert opinion that a malpractice lawyer helps you develop. Yet such complaints can have a major effect even though they take time.
I personally have found several errors in my own medical records. One example...they ask about alcohol use. I tell them, nearly none. Maybe 1 drink over ! 3 month span. The nurse wrote down...3 drinks per day!!!
They had me on a ton of meds, In october I nearly died of blood loss. I was so weak it was a huge effort to navigate the 10 feet to the bathroom without breathing like I ran a marathon. I’d been felling hellish for a couple of years, they said I’d had a heart attack. I never noticed any chest pain.
So, in october I went off several meds prior to surgery. I had digestive bleeds and they did what they could to eliminate tubular adenoma in my bowel. My blood counts began to rise a bit, but mostly I felt better than my blood counts should allow. Then, the kidney doc took me off of diuretics, and I felt even better!! And, no more swelling. So, I optedto eliminate a few other meds and began to feel human. I’m still not where I would like to be, I’m still limited, but a whole lot better than I was 9 months ago.
I went through tests after test with no treatments for those issues. I’m not doing any more tests. As long as this level of well being exists, I will make more of my own medical decisions. I will do what works for me.
“I personally have found several errors in my own medical records.”
About 20 years ago I was at m my annual physical. My PCP asked me how I was doing with ****.
Me: I don’t have that.
Doc: So you’ve recovered.
Me: No; I never had that.
Doc: Well have to update your records.
Then ...
Repeat the above conversation.
Then repeat again.
Turns out the data entry people screwed up. My husband’s unmarried sister had the same last name as mine, and was in the same medical group. Data people were just looking at last names it seems, so some of her info was in my file, and some of my info was in her file.
What a mess. Could be very dangerous in the case of an emergency. An accident waiting to happen.
Thanks for all your input everybody, it is greatly appreciated!
My wife wants to try to pursue this at this point, but it will definitely have to be somebody that will take it on contingency, because we can’t afford to hire anybody at this point. So I will definitely look into finding somebody that has had success in dealing with these type cases.
My biggest concern is that we don’t really have all that much hard evidence to prove what we are saying. What I do have is my live updates to family and friends in my text thread and much of it contradicts what was actually entered in her records from numbers we have had quoted back to us over that period. I am going to get a text dump to document just so we have them all that we can print out and save. We do also have the cardiology tests from November that showed improved heart function and some recent pulmonary tests from March that showed her improvement from 2 years prior, after being told for the past 11 years that she would not get any better.
I have to add there were a bunch of good doctors and nurses that took great care of her, but a bunch more that were apparently just there for a paycheck. Everything that came from the administrator was trying to cover the hospitals collective ass... she promised us answers that never came, I suspect due to the liability those answers would give.
One other thing I failed to mention was about 10 days in to the second half of her stay, they started talking about releasing her again and I asked how they knew the pneumonia was gone now? The answer we got was that her numbers all show it must be gone or mostly gone. I said that is the same answer we got when she was actually released with pneumonia and I said I can tell you we will not be leaving this room until you can show me that it is gone. About 10 minutes later, they were wheeling in a portable x-ray machine to take another chest x-ray.
That afternoon, we had a meeting with the administrator who I was in direct contact with after the second complaint that I filed and also a new Palliative care Dr. that had seen her a couple of times but always managed to miss the times when any of us, the family was there and we wanted to know what his part was in the decision making process, because everything we read about Palliative care was that it was pretty much the final step before hospice came into play. Well he explained he was merely being consulted and his job was simply to make her more comfortable in dealing with her chronic condition and that it had nothing to do with hospice. During that meeting he said that the latest chest X-ray looked much better than the previous one they did (while she was in the catatonic state in ER and the tech had to try to get a shot between breaths as she was not responding to anything that was said) and then he said but I am sure you would not be able to see the difference. My mom spoke up and said uh yes I would, I was trained in 1962 and spent 40 years in X-ray and I would like to see them both right now, so he pulled both up on the computer and showed them to her side by side. She said yes it does look better but I still see something there in her lower lobe. Our meeting ended shortly after that and about 10 minutes later, he comes back in and says you know, I went out there and was looking at the latest one again and I do see something a little concerning and I would like to have it looked at with an ultra-sound and to see if there is any fluid present and if so we will remove it and have it tested. The next morning, I got there just as they were going to wheel her out for the test and I asked if this test was being done with contrast? I only asked that because they told us the kidney damage was 80% due to low BP and Oxygen levels and 15% due to the contrast used in that first abdominal CT scan and I did not want her to spend another 2 weeks in there recovering from further kidney damage. They said yes the orders are with contrast and we both said at the same time then we will have to decline the procedure. At that point, the doctor rewrote the order without contrast and they took her down a couple hours later. They did indeed find fluid in the sac around one of her lungs and performed a thoracentesis and removed 600 ml of fluid (just over 20 ounces), which was subsequently tested and came back as normal.
Again, I don’t think this would have been found without me making a big deal about knowing the pneumonia was gone AND my mom saying she still saw something on that latest X-ray. Since that procedure my wife has been on a diuretic 3 days a week and also getting replacement potassium/magnesium supplements each day after.
Also, we had a follow up appointment today after my initial post, with her regular pulmonologist and she reacted about the same as her regular cardiologist did in unbelief as we told her how what should have been a simple outpatient appendectomy turned into a month long stay... She too knew how much better my wife was just prior to this happening.
One positive thing that happened was the on call pulmonologist that saw her in ICU recommended that after she got released from the hospital and saw her regular doctor that we ask about a new procedure called a Zephyr valve and we did, so she had my wife do a breathing test today and then she made a referral to another doctor that specializes in this new procedure. So we will see where that goes now. Apparently they put some sort of tiny valves in the bottom of the lungs that allows the trapped dead air to be pushed out. This is her primary problem with her COPD, for every breath she takes in, she can only push out 23% of it, so 77% is trapped in there. That was ultimately her problem that caused her to return to the ER that day she was released, besides the pneumonia she was released with, they did an arterial blood gas draw that showed her CO2 level to be 91% which is what put her in that catatonic state.
I am sorry to say this but until you have her complete seet of medical records separately obtained from all of her providers you are spinning your wheels . . . and ours.
I meant other physical evidence, like audio or video. I don’t have a physical hard copy but we do have access to all the medical records thru her portal, it shows literally everything, all diagnosis, test results, X-rays etc.
Get on Chat GPT Plus or Claude Pro and upload those documents and images and get AI working for you. It will help you in ways you cannot imagine.
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