Personal Injury Law

First steps to investigating a negligent gallbaldder removal claim

By Benjamin J. Sansone, Esq.

Sansone / Lauber receives numerous requests to represent patients injured as a result of a failed gallbladder surgery in St Louis and throughout Missouri. As stated in a prior blog, we have recently been retained to represent a woman who has ongoing medical maladies as the result of negligence in her gallbladder removal surgery. Specifically, the wrong ducts were cut, the surgical clips were placed improperly, and surgical clips were left in her body on the wrong ducts creating a bile blockage.

Gallbladder removal surgery, or "lap-choli" is a fairly common procedure and as such, most times not taken as seriously by some medical providers as maybe it should be. Therefore, it is also fairly common to see Missouri and Illinois medical negligence and/or medical malpractice lawsuits associated with it. As an experienced medical malpractice and St Louis wrongful death lawyer, I have seen very avoidable mistakes that occur in a lap-choli procedure lead to death several months later.

The first steps in determining if their was negligence is to review the medical records, particularly, the surgeon's operative report, which is probably the most important document to get asap if you suspect medical malpractice. It is always wise for the patient or the family to immediately request the available records, I have seen these records get changed later on - that is where the term "doctoring the records" comes from!. See 2nd half of this article - Medical Record Alteration in Wrongful Death Lawsuit.

It is also necessary to review the materials provided to the patient/client, the conversation that they had with the surgeon prior to the surgery, what the patient understood to be the outcome of the surgery, and what risks were laid out to them and why. The most common risk is what we saw with this most recent case: severe damage to the common bile duct and just a lack of attention to care and detail. Blood clots, internal bleeding, injury to neighboring organs, trocar-induced bowel damage, infections from leaking bile, and death are other risks associated with this procedure.

Full post as published by Missouri Injury Law Blog on March 14, 2011 (boomark / email).