bloodrayne
08-09-2004, 12:40 PM
Towel Left In Woman's Chest: Family Sues After Surgical Mistake Found
BOLIVAR – Bonnie Valle died with a secret close to her heart, a secret she unknowingly kept within her body.
Valle frequently complained about an odd feeling in her chest in the years following lung surgery to treat emphysema, family members say.
“She always said, ‘On the left side it feels like there’s something there. It felt like something moved,’ ” said her daughter, Jeanne Clark of East Canton.
The Bolivar woman’s doctors repeatedly told her it was just the progression of the disease and that the benefits of the surgery would not last forever, Clark said.
When Valle died in 2002, a day after her 60th birthday, she donated her body to the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine at Rootstown.
Clark said her mother hoped the contribution would help doctors develop better treatments for the disease that had slowly suffocated her.
It was at NEOUCOM, during a dissection in the anatomy lab, that a faculty member stumbled upon Bonnie Valle’s secret: A green surgical cloth the size of a large hand towel mistakenly had been left behind her left lung following that 1995 surgery.
Clark filed a lawsuit in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court last week seeking unspecified damages against the Cleveland Clinic, her mother’s Canton-based physician, Jeffrey Miller, and his practice.
Because Valle’s doctors never found the towel, she suffered serious complications, incurred medical expenses and ultimately died, the lawsuit says.
“I think it insults common sense to say that a towel left rolled up behind a lung didn’t affect the quality and duration of her life,” said Mark Okey, the Canton attorney representing Clark. “I don’t believe it and I don’t think a jury will.”
Valle, a former nurse’s aide, was very sick when she went to the Cleveland Clinic for lung-reduction surgery in October 1995. Smoking nearly two packs of cigarettes a day since the age of 15 had left her with emphysema and dependent on a constant supply of oxygen, Clark said.
Her lungs were stretched to the limit, taking up so much space in her chest that there wasn’t room to take a breath.
Valle’s doctor at the Cleveland Clinic, Thomas J. Kirby, decided she was a good candidate for lung-reduction surgery.
The procedure involves removing diseased lung tissue, thus allowing the lungs to expand within the chest cavity.
Kirby collapsed Valle’s lungs one at a time and removed 46 grams of tissue from the left lung and 22 grams from the right, according to an operative report prepared by the clinic. With both lungs appearing to function satisfactorily, surgeons put Valle’s chest back together and transferred her to the intensive care unit.
The last line of the report notes that the procedure went “without complications.”
But as doctors were busy checking her lungs for leaks and wiring her rib cage back together, they missed the towel.
Valle spent the next 41 days in the hospital recovering. During that time doctors noticed a mass near her left lung that wasn’t there before the surgery, Okey said.
Thinking it might be an infection, doctors treated her with antibiotics but the mass never got smaller. Nor did it grow in size, prompting the doctors to assume it was a post-operative change, possibly due to scarring, Okey said.
“They said, ‘It’s not changing, not growing. As long as it remains stagnant, we’re not going to bother it,’ ” he said.
Miller, Valle’s doctor in Canton, didn’t catch the problem either, even though he had X-rays that showed the mass, Okey said.
As the years went by, Clark said her mother got weaker until she could do little more than sit in a chair and watch TV.
“She couldn’t stand to do the dishes and I had to clean the house for her,” Clark said. “She got out of breath just going to the bathroom.”
Valle’s 13th trip to a hospital since the lung surgery came just after her birthday in June 2002.
“Her birthday was one of the best days I had ever seen her have,” granddaughter Melinda Valle said. “She said, ‘I just feel so good today.’ She was determined to get out of there.”
But that trip to Massillon Community Hospital was her last. Emphysema finally claimed her life.
As she willed, the hospital shipped Valle’s body to the medical school. The school didn’t use the cadaver immediately and didn’t open the chest cavity until August 2003, more than a year after her death.
When the faculty member supervising the dissection discovered the surgical towel, work stopped and school officials were notified, said NEOUCOM general counsel Maria Schimer.
“It’s pretty unusual to find something like that,” Schimer said, adding that she’s never heard of it happening another time during her 20 years at the school.
The school contacted Miller, who then broke the news to Clark.
“I told her I do not think this affected her duration or quality of life,” Miller wrote in a letter to the medical school.
“She lived seven years ... which is certainly as well as one would have expected her to survive given her severe emphysema and poor pulmonary function and overall condition,” Miller added.
For Clark, it was tough to hear.
“I just started crying,” she said. “It was like her dying all over again. That’s why she felt so sick.”
Clark regrets not believing her mother when she said something didn’t feel right.
The family wanted to do its own investigation, and enlisted a Pittsburgh-based forensic pathologist to complete an autopsy. In his report, the doctor noted a green surgical towel 27 inches by 18 inches covered in a tan combination of formaldehyde, blood and other fluids.
“Her body was literally growing around it, trying to isolate it,” Okey said. “It’s a foreign object and her body was trying to fight it off.”
The family has filed the lawsuit in an attempt to get more documents from the Cleveland Clinic, he said.
Cleveland Clinic spokesman Cole Hatcher said the hospital had not seen the lawsuit yet and does not generally comment on pending litigation.
Kirby, the doctor who performed the surgery, is no longer with the Cleveland Clinic. He left in 1998 to direct lung transplants and heart surgeries at University Hospitals, but was terminated from that position in 2002 and filed for bankruptcy last year, records show.
Miller did not immediately return a call seeking comment that was left with his office staff at Pulmonary Physicians in Canton.
Clark said she hopes her lawsuit exposes the mistakes that she says caused her mother to suffer.
“I need closure,” she said. “If not for her donating her body, we would have never found out.”
Editor’s note: Janet Lieser of Bolivar, an older sister of Bonnie Valle, requested that The Times-Reporter publish this story to share with the public. “Nobody believes you when you say this happened,” she said. Lieser said Valle’s husband, Reno Valle Sr., 65, died this year after learning of the pathologist’s findings. “He cried for three days. They won’t say it, but he died of a broken heart,” Lieser said.
BOLIVAR – Bonnie Valle died with a secret close to her heart, a secret she unknowingly kept within her body.
Valle frequently complained about an odd feeling in her chest in the years following lung surgery to treat emphysema, family members say.
“She always said, ‘On the left side it feels like there’s something there. It felt like something moved,’ ” said her daughter, Jeanne Clark of East Canton.
The Bolivar woman’s doctors repeatedly told her it was just the progression of the disease and that the benefits of the surgery would not last forever, Clark said.
When Valle died in 2002, a day after her 60th birthday, she donated her body to the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine at Rootstown.
Clark said her mother hoped the contribution would help doctors develop better treatments for the disease that had slowly suffocated her.
It was at NEOUCOM, during a dissection in the anatomy lab, that a faculty member stumbled upon Bonnie Valle’s secret: A green surgical cloth the size of a large hand towel mistakenly had been left behind her left lung following that 1995 surgery.
Clark filed a lawsuit in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court last week seeking unspecified damages against the Cleveland Clinic, her mother’s Canton-based physician, Jeffrey Miller, and his practice.
Because Valle’s doctors never found the towel, she suffered serious complications, incurred medical expenses and ultimately died, the lawsuit says.
“I think it insults common sense to say that a towel left rolled up behind a lung didn’t affect the quality and duration of her life,” said Mark Okey, the Canton attorney representing Clark. “I don’t believe it and I don’t think a jury will.”
Valle, a former nurse’s aide, was very sick when she went to the Cleveland Clinic for lung-reduction surgery in October 1995. Smoking nearly two packs of cigarettes a day since the age of 15 had left her with emphysema and dependent on a constant supply of oxygen, Clark said.
Her lungs were stretched to the limit, taking up so much space in her chest that there wasn’t room to take a breath.
Valle’s doctor at the Cleveland Clinic, Thomas J. Kirby, decided she was a good candidate for lung-reduction surgery.
The procedure involves removing diseased lung tissue, thus allowing the lungs to expand within the chest cavity.
Kirby collapsed Valle’s lungs one at a time and removed 46 grams of tissue from the left lung and 22 grams from the right, according to an operative report prepared by the clinic. With both lungs appearing to function satisfactorily, surgeons put Valle’s chest back together and transferred her to the intensive care unit.
The last line of the report notes that the procedure went “without complications.”
But as doctors were busy checking her lungs for leaks and wiring her rib cage back together, they missed the towel.
Valle spent the next 41 days in the hospital recovering. During that time doctors noticed a mass near her left lung that wasn’t there before the surgery, Okey said.
Thinking it might be an infection, doctors treated her with antibiotics but the mass never got smaller. Nor did it grow in size, prompting the doctors to assume it was a post-operative change, possibly due to scarring, Okey said.
“They said, ‘It’s not changing, not growing. As long as it remains stagnant, we’re not going to bother it,’ ” he said.
Miller, Valle’s doctor in Canton, didn’t catch the problem either, even though he had X-rays that showed the mass, Okey said.
As the years went by, Clark said her mother got weaker until she could do little more than sit in a chair and watch TV.
“She couldn’t stand to do the dishes and I had to clean the house for her,” Clark said. “She got out of breath just going to the bathroom.”
Valle’s 13th trip to a hospital since the lung surgery came just after her birthday in June 2002.
“Her birthday was one of the best days I had ever seen her have,” granddaughter Melinda Valle said. “She said, ‘I just feel so good today.’ She was determined to get out of there.”
But that trip to Massillon Community Hospital was her last. Emphysema finally claimed her life.
As she willed, the hospital shipped Valle’s body to the medical school. The school didn’t use the cadaver immediately and didn’t open the chest cavity until August 2003, more than a year after her death.
When the faculty member supervising the dissection discovered the surgical towel, work stopped and school officials were notified, said NEOUCOM general counsel Maria Schimer.
“It’s pretty unusual to find something like that,” Schimer said, adding that she’s never heard of it happening another time during her 20 years at the school.
The school contacted Miller, who then broke the news to Clark.
“I told her I do not think this affected her duration or quality of life,” Miller wrote in a letter to the medical school.
“She lived seven years ... which is certainly as well as one would have expected her to survive given her severe emphysema and poor pulmonary function and overall condition,” Miller added.
For Clark, it was tough to hear.
“I just started crying,” she said. “It was like her dying all over again. That’s why she felt so sick.”
Clark regrets not believing her mother when she said something didn’t feel right.
The family wanted to do its own investigation, and enlisted a Pittsburgh-based forensic pathologist to complete an autopsy. In his report, the doctor noted a green surgical towel 27 inches by 18 inches covered in a tan combination of formaldehyde, blood and other fluids.
“Her body was literally growing around it, trying to isolate it,” Okey said. “It’s a foreign object and her body was trying to fight it off.”
The family has filed the lawsuit in an attempt to get more documents from the Cleveland Clinic, he said.
Cleveland Clinic spokesman Cole Hatcher said the hospital had not seen the lawsuit yet and does not generally comment on pending litigation.
Kirby, the doctor who performed the surgery, is no longer with the Cleveland Clinic. He left in 1998 to direct lung transplants and heart surgeries at University Hospitals, but was terminated from that position in 2002 and filed for bankruptcy last year, records show.
Miller did not immediately return a call seeking comment that was left with his office staff at Pulmonary Physicians in Canton.
Clark said she hopes her lawsuit exposes the mistakes that she says caused her mother to suffer.
“I need closure,” she said. “If not for her donating her body, we would have never found out.”
Editor’s note: Janet Lieser of Bolivar, an older sister of Bonnie Valle, requested that The Times-Reporter publish this story to share with the public. “Nobody believes you when you say this happened,” she said. Lieser said Valle’s husband, Reno Valle Sr., 65, died this year after learning of the pathologist’s findings. “He cried for three days. They won’t say it, but he died of a broken heart,” Lieser said.