Welcome and thank you for joining me. I am Gerry Oginski in New York Medical Malpractice and Personal Injury trial lawyer, practicing law here in the State of New York. Today's topic is failure to diagnose heart attacks. What are they and why are they important. The failure to recognize a heart attack has significant dramatic implications for the patient. If a heart attack occurs it can kill off a good portion of your heart and if it is not recognized either immediately before it happens or at the time it's happening, the results could be devastating.
Let me tell you about a case I recently handled involving a young man and a failure to diagnose a heart attack. The patient developed chest pain and went to his local emergency room. While in the emergency room they hooked him up to a cardiac monitor and they drew his blood and did all sorts of tests. They realized that they needed more time in order to properly evaluate to see whether or not he was, in fact, having a heart attack.
The hospital was so concerned that they decided to admit him to the hospital to run more tests. They were going to have him do a stress test. They were going to get an echocardiogram which is like a sonogram of the heart. They were going to draw blood on a regular basis to see whether or not certain enzyme levels were rising, to indicate that he might have a heart attack.
So what went wrong with this patient's care. It wasn't the test that were ordered. All of those tests were appropriate and it was good medical practice to do that. The problem arose when the doctors were interpreting those particular tests. They were interpreted incorrectly. In fact, the computers were reading abnormalities in these particular tests. But the doctors who were looking at him, blew it off and said, not a big deal. That's artifact, that's insignificant. We don't care about that. The patient is normal. Everything is fine. He followed up with his cardiologist a few weeks later and he told him, he was still having some chest pain.
The cardiologist never bothered to get the testing that was done at the hospital and based upon his own testing realized that the patient was just fine. He told the patient to come back in a month, we will check you again. The next month the patient returned as directed and again, he had the same type of complaints. You know, I have chest pain, I am feeling uncomfortable. I don't know what's going on. And again, the doctor pooh-poohed and said not to worry. All the tests before show that you are fine.
The third time, it happened again. He came back to the office, made the complaint. The doctor said not to worry about it, you are fine. A few days after the last visit to the cardiologist the patient developed severe chest pain and difficulty in breathing. He called an ambulance and was rushed to his local emergency room which was exactly the place where he had been taken to earlier, a few months earlier to be fully evaluate.
Once the doctors hooked him up to all the monitors in the emergency room they recognized he was having a massive heart attack and by that point there was very little they could do to save a good part of his heart. It turns out, over the next few days and additional testing revealed that the patient had three arteries, three major coronary arteries that were severely blocked.
He had three blockages and had this been recognized three or four months earlier, the patient could have had an elective triple bypass surgery, which would have prevented, what's known as the ischemia, a cut off or a lack of blood flow to the heart what caused him to have this massive heart attack.
A majority of his heart was killed off, as a result of the lack of blood flow to the heart and because of that this patient suffered every complication known to mankind. So much so that he ultimately was told that he needed to have a heart transplant. This patient unfortunately is physically incapable of doing any type of activity. He gets tired just from walking across the room. He needs assistance to do all types of daily activities and it's tragic because when we went to investigate and look back at those medical records, we had doctors and experts and cardiologists look at those diagnostic tests and they told us that these tests were clearly abnormal and even the computer confirmed that they were abnormal and the doctor should have recognized this and this was totally preventable. He could have had elective surgery which would have prevented the heart attack and he would have been just fine.
Unfortunately, for this young man and his family, he wasn't. And that's it for today's topic on heart attacks and why they are so important to prevent. I am Gerry Oginski. Thank you for joining me. Have a great day.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services