Confidential
Medical malpractice suit involving a 46-year-old woman settles for $6.5 million, after doctor caused a massive subarachnoid hemorrhage caused by an unnecessary procedure.
On April 25, 2005, a 44-year-old woman walked into the hospital for a procedure to treat what she was told was
atherosclerotic plaque in her carotid artery walls. During this surgery, the doctor performed an un-consented balloon angioplasty on the patient puncturing her internal carotid artery with the guide wire, causing a massive bleed in her brain and resulting in irreversible brain damage. This same woman left the hospital in a coma and was transferred to a long-term care nursing home facility in a vegetative state on a ventilator, surviving only with tube feeds, until her until her death on November 22, 2007. Joseph L. Messa, Jr. of Messa & Associates argued that the doctors were negligent in failing to perform a thorough diagnostic preoperative evaluation and work-up of the patient prior to her initial surgery, and failed to obtain proper informed consent prior to the surgery.
