Surgeon at Yale New Haven Hospital Removes Wrong Rib

Even the best hospitals in the world aren’t immune to cases of medical malpractice. Last year, Deborah Craven, a sixty-year-old woman from Milford, Connecticut underwent surgery at Yale New Haven Hospital to have her eighth rib removed due to a precancerous lesion. Unfortunately, her surgeon removed her seventh rib instead.

After the procedure, Craven complained of ongoing pain and was readmitted for further examination. An x-ray revealed that the eighth rib was still intact, along with the metallic markers that had been used to identify the rib during surgery. The surgeon’s assistant tried to cover up the mistake, telling Craven that they simply hadn’t removed “enough” of her eighth rib. It was this attempt at deceit that most outraged the patient and her lawyer.

“Absent the lying my client would never have instituted a lawsuit,” said attorney Joel Faxon in a press release. “As the old adage goes the cover-up is worse than the crime.”
Craven was forced to undergo a second surgery on the same day under the false pretenses that the doctors hadn’t made an error during the first surgery. She also asked that the surgeon’s assistant not participate in the second procedure, but her request was ignored. Now, Ms. Craven is suing the hospital for in damages.

Surgical errors such as this are more common than we’d like to think. In 2007, Rhode Island Hospital – a teaching hospital for Brown University – came under heavy scrutiny after doctors operated on the wrong side of patients’ brains on three separate occasions. In one case, the surgeon declined to mark the correct side of the head to operate on because he claimed he had committed it to memory.

If you’ve been the victim of a doctor’s negligence, you deserve compensation for your pain and suffering. Give us a call today, and let the experienced malpractice attorneys at Ask 4 Sam help you get started.