Oakwood Hospital Ordered To Pay $21 Million To Family Of Patient Who Died After Brain Surgery She Didn't Need
DETROIT (WWJ) - Doctors operated on the wrong patient — and now a jury has awarded $21 million to the family of an 81-year-old Belleville woman who died following brain surgery at Oakwood Hospital.
Attorney Geoffrey Fieger told WWJ Newsradio 950's Chrystal Knight that, although the family of Bimla Nayyar won the suit in Wayne County Circuit Court, he plans to ask the state to look into this as a criminal case.
"In my 37 years of law practice I have never seen a more terrible, horrific case — what they did to a poor woman — and then lied about it," Fieger said.
According to Fieger, Nayyar was hospitalized at Oakwood in January of 2012 for problems relating to a dislocation of her jaw — or TMJ.
Fieger explained that there was some confusion, and somehow hospital staff mistakenly thought that Nayyar was bleeding in her brain and needed immediate brain surgery.
"According to their claim (the hospital) mixed up her x-rays and thought that she was another patient," Fieger said.
Nayyar was rushed to an operating room where five holes were drilled into her head and the right side of her skull was sawed off. At that time, doctors realized that there was nothing wrong with Nayyar's brain, Fieger said, but the hospital allegedly did not inform the family that they had operated on the wrong patient.
Nayyar was life support for 60 days until she died.
Fieger said surgery to correct Nayyar's actual problem should've been routine.
"It's something that can be done in a dentist chair," Fieger said. "Instead they took off the right side of her head, and killed her."
In announcing their verdict on Wednesday, the jury asked, in a note to the court, whether they could demand that Oakwood Hospital apologize for its wrongful and outrageous conduct.
In court, Fieger said, Oakwood admitted to operating on the wrong patient, but said any award should be capped at $400,000 because no harm was done to Nayyar.
Oakwood in a statement that it's very concerned about how the details of this case are being portrayed. The hospital plans to appeal.
Fieger said this is the largest verdict of 2015 in Michigan.
