A Florida medical malpractice lawsuit filed by a 49-year-old man who had been rendered a quadriplegic as the result of a car accident in 1998 but nonetheless was self-reliant and living independently despite limited use of his arms and being confined to a wheelchair, alleged that his limbs had to be amputated after of a kidney stone removal procedure at a Florida hospital in April 2019.
According to the man’s lawsuit, he suffered frequent kidney stones as a result of having to use a catheter. After undergoing the routine procedure to remove kidney stones in the defendant hospital, he developed an infection that developed into sepsis that caused his blood pressure to dangerously drop. He suffered a heart attack as a result, during which he was starved of oxygen for seven minutes while in the hospital’s intensive care unit.
The vasopressor drugs administered to address his depressed blood pressure led to reduced blood flow to his extremities and the ultimate need to amputate his arms and legs. The Florida medical malpractice lawsuit alleged that the hospital failed to diagnose the man’s sepsis and to appropriately treat his medical conditions, including intubation and the use of IV antibiotics.
The man’s Florida medical malpractice lawsuit was settled during mediation earlier this year for a confidential amount: “My life is never going to be the same. I gotta ask for help. For everything.”
The hospital issued a statement saying, in part, that it is committed “to maintaining the highest standards of patient care possible. Our team makes patient safety a top priority and has carefully reviewed this patient’s journey to find any opportunities to learn from his experience.”
A recent medical study stated: “more than 30 million cases of hospital-treated sepsis are estimated to occur every year worldwide, with 5.3 million patients dying from sepsis. Sepsis is also of great significance in the intensive care unit (ICU), where it affects approximately 30% of patients, with large variations between different geographical regions. A study based in the USA with more than 170,000 sepsis cases reported that 55% of all sepsis cases required ICU admission … HA [hospital acquired] sepsis is of major public health importance, and the burden is particularly high in ICUs. There is an urgent need to improve the implementation of global and local infection prevention and management strategies to reduce its high burden among hospitalized patients.”
If you or a loved one have suffered serious harm (or worse) as a result of sepsis in a hospital in Florida or in another U.S. state, you should promptly find a Florida medical malpractice attorney, or a medical malpractice attorney in your state, who may investigate your medical malpractice claim for you and represent you or your loved one in a hospital malpractice case, if appropriate.
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