Welcome and thank you for joining me. I am Gerry Oginski in New York Medical Malpractice and Personal Entry Trial Lawyer Practicing Lawyer in the State of New York. I want to tell you about the case I handled recently involving a woman who died as a result of a misplaced feeding tube. The woman’s two adult sons had come to me one day. Wanting to know why their mother had died. In fact, the reason why she died is because a feeding tube that she was getting was misplaced and was never recognized that it had come out of place.
The reason she was on a feeding tube was that she was involved in a house fire and suffered inhalation injuries to her lungs from the smoke. And she was auto ventilated that was helping her breath but she was conscious and aware of everything that was going on. And she developed complications while on the ventilator and required to have this feeding tube where she would get nutrition into this tube directly into her stomach. And her stomach would have processed it, her body would process the food and everything, it should have been fine.
The problem was this feeding tube became dislodged and not a single doctor or nurse recognized what did happen until it was already too late. In fact, that feeding tube has come out of place that food was now going out into her abdominal cavity, into the rest of her body and it was creating an infection and nobody recognized it. And she died as a result of that displacement, so these children came to me wanting to know what happened. It was during the course of discovery when I obtained the records for the family I reviewed it and I had an expert review the records did we learn that the tube had actually been misplaced and the contents of the food were going where they should not have been. And that was why this particular incident happened and she died.
The unfortunate reality is that this was an entirely preventable. Had the nurses and doctors been more vigilant in recognizing where these tube was, on each of the days that she was in the hospital, this tragedy would not have occurred. That’s it for today’s video tip; I want to thank you for joining me. I'm Gerry Oginski, have a great day.
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