Story first reported from kwtx.com
Jerry Crocker, 62, of Temple has filed suit against Scott & White Hospital, alleging that his continuing health problems are the result of damage caused by an instrument that was left in his abdomen after he underwent surgery for stomach cancer in November 2010.
Scott & White acknowledges the surgical error, but disagrees that Crocker's complications stem from the mistake.
Crocker originally underwent surgery on Nov. 15, 2010, but immediately began to experience severe abdominal pain and within three days he began to run a fever. An X-ray and a CT scan revealed a retractor measuring 8 inches long and 2 inches wide as well as "likely perforation of the duodenal stump," the lawsuit says.
Crocker underwent emergency surgery early the next morning for removal of the instrument and doctors confirmed the perforation, which the lawsuit said led to an abscess, infected abdominal cavity and sepsis.
Crocker was hospitalized for 17 days.
The suit says he has lost 25 percent of his original weight and that his nutritional status has prevented him from receiving necessary chemotherapy and radiation treatments.
Scott & White's Chairman of Surgery Dr. W. Roy Smythe said the hospital offered Crocker a settlement before the lawsuit was filed on March 12 in state district court in Belton, but the offer was refused.
Neither the hospital nor Crocker's attorney, Dale Williams of Waco, would say how much was offered.
Smythe said the hospital's legal team is reviewing the medical records from the case, to determine at how the error happened.
He said has already been changed to help ensure a similar error won't happen again. He added that the hospital routinely reviews hundreds of cases a year as a matter of medical treatment improvement, without legal action being involved.
He said instruments are left in patients in just 1 of every 19,000 surgeries nationwide, and said the incidence is less frequent than that at Scott & White.
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