Medical Malpractice Warning Signs: Did a Surgical Error Occur?

South Carolina Injury Lawyer Explains How to Find Out

Video Transcript:

Randy Hood:

Honestly, people think it's really odd to think that somebody can operate on the wrong side of your body in 2021, or they can leave a sponge in you in 2021, but it happens.

Judy Maggio:

If you or a loved one are victims of medical malpractice, where do you turn for help? We are going to find out today on Ask the Lawyer. Hi everybody, I'm Judy Maggio with the AskTheLawyers.com, and my guest today is South Carolina attorney, Randy Hood. We have a quick reminder for you though, before we get started, if you wanna ask Randy questions about your specific situation, go to askthelawyers.com, click the button you'll see at the top of the page that says, Ask a Lawyer. It doesn't cost you anything at all to get your questions answered that way, right now though, it's my turn to ask the questions, and we really appreciate Randy giving us his time today. First question, Randy, can you tell us a bit about your experience filing medical malpractice claims for folks who have suffered injuries due to surgical errors?

Randy Hood:

Certainly Judy, I hope you're well. Surgical error is the type of thing that happens much more often than anybody would ever expect, and it could include operating on the wrong side of the body, it could include operating on the wrong disc, if they're doing spinal surgery, it could include getting into your bowel for any type of internal surgery in the abdominal area, and then it causes a bowel perforation. They sew you up and you get sepsis. It could be caused by leaving a sponge or a foreign object in your body, it can be caused by cutting a bile duct and a laparoscopic cholecystectomy, which is basically the removal of your gall bladder, it could be caused by cardiac where they somehow actually caused a puncture in your heart area and it causes something called cardiac tamponade, there's a multitude of things that happen when a surgical error occurs, but honestly, people think it's really odd to think that somebody can operate on the wrong side of your body in 2021, or they can leave a sponge in you in 2021, but it happens and it happens much more frequently than anybody would ever believe.

Judy Maggio:

These sound like very serious situations when these mistakes are made, what are the injuries that people go through when something like this happens?

Randy Hood:

A lot of times, it can be an infectious process. If they leave something in the wrong part of your body... I mean, excuse me, if they leave something in your body, it's a foreign object that's not supposed to be there, it can cause infection. If someone gets into your bowel, causes a bowel perforation and sews you back up. It requires vigilance after any procedure, but in a case of something like that, a perforated bowel, it can cause a horrendous injury, it can kill someone, it can cause sepsis. And so it could be cardiac tamponade where you basically cause the heart to stop beating. It causes death, death many times is the result of a surgical error, and sometimes you'll see, obviously infection, you could also take out an organ if you operate it on the right kidney and you're supposed to be operating on the left kidney, you take out an organ that's not supposed to be taken out. There's just a multitude of things that can happen to someone if a surgical error occurs.

Judy Maggio:

And if someone does have a bad outcome after a particular surgery, how do you know if it's medical malpractice, what's the difference between, say, a surgical error and just a bad outcome after surgery?

Randy Hood:

You know, that's a great question Judy, I wish I had a great answer for you. The best that I can tell you is if someone has suffered a serious injury after a surgery and it wasn't supposed to occur, you probably need to talk to a lawyer. It may not mean there's a case. I personally will look at... I'll have conversations with people or look at or my staff will review thousands of cases this year for me personally, not for other people in my firm, and of those, we may file 50 to 100, so there's a huge amount of cases that come in, and a lot of times, even though you think there's a case there, it's not, but unless you have it reviewed, you don't know, and what it takes is somebody that breached the standard of care, that means they did something that few other doctors would have done under the same or similar circumstances, and if a doctor breached the standard of care and that breach caused you terrible damages or bad damages, then there's probably gonna be a lawsuit involved.

Judy Maggio:

So who determines that standard of care?

Randy Hood:

The standard of care is determined by a lot of things. There is a periodical repository where most of the medical literature goes from all over the world, and that's called Up-To-Date, and that is something that is used by medical professionals on a daily basis. They have to keep themselves apprised of the literature because there's changes every day in our world, it could be textbooks, the textbooks, to be frank with you, are becoming out-dated just like anything else with the change in technology. Something that's more than six months to a year old may not have efficacy or reliability any longer, and so it's much more about the current literature than it is about a text book 20 years ago, though there are certain textbooks that still can be considered reliable, it's also experience... And some of it's common sense. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that you don't leave a pair of hemostat, the scissors, in someone's body, somebody just left them by mistake during a surgical error, but there are maybe other things that are very, very complicated, for instance, someone goes in and they have an abdominal procedure, a woman has a hysterectomy and she's had two Cesarean sections and you have what can be called a concrete belly or there's a lot of adhesions and the doctor has to excise those adhesions in order to be able to move around in the belly, and if somehow he pulled something and he can't see it, but it pulls it's adhesed to your bowel, makes a hole, sews you back up and then you leak bowel contents into your body for three days and get septic, that may be a case and it may not be a case. It depends on how vigilant they were in regard to your post-surgical treatment. And so it really is really... It's hard to say what is a case and what's not a case? What I would say is, if you had a procedure and you suffered a serious injury that was unexpected, I would have it seen by somebody, I would have it looked at my lawyer.

Judy Maggio:

I think a lot of people have the misunderstanding that medical malpractice harms doctors and hospitals... Talk about that from your perspective.

Randy Hood:

I think if you have someone who will be intellectually honest with you, they're gonna tell you the opposite, medical malpractice is quality control. People think that we cause the medical rates to go up, it's an infinitesimal amount that it causes it to go up because like I said, I will have thousands come to me and I tell a thousand people, "I don't think you have a case. I don't think you have a case, and here's why." Those are 1000 people that are not gonna file a lawsuit against the doctor, and the one that I'm bringing are a time of the situation where it is resolved, I would say 98 to 99% of my cases are resolved by settlement. I have to go to court probably once a year or once every couple of years to try a case because there is a dispute, but in the cases that do go to trial, it's a dispute over what they consider to be the value of the claim versus whether a doctor did something wrong or not, and what this requires is someone who understands the medical malpractice process, I would think that they would need a medical professional on staff. We have a nurse on staff, and we have nurses that we work with, and we have hundreds of doctors that we have talked with, thousands of doctors that we have spoken with about these cases, and you've got to have that team and those people that are able to say, "Yes, this is the case," or, "No, this is not a case." And we have a lot more non-cases than we do have their meritorious cases. We have a lot more non-cases, we have a lot more non-cases that contact us, we don't bring those cases.

Judy Maggio:

I understand. Such vital information today. Thank you so much, Randy, for answering our questions about medical malpractice situations. That will do it for this edition of Ask the Lawyers. My guest has been South Carolina attorney Randy hood. We do have a reminder: If you have specific questions you wanna ask Randy, go to AskTheLawyers.com, click the button at the top of the page that says, Ask a Lawyer and just ask away. Thanks for much for being with us today. I'm Judy Maggio with AskTheLawyers.

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