Nonetheless, when reading the opinion, I gotta say that I don't come away from the thing thinking that that the Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital in Santa Clarita is necessarily the place to which I want to go if I'm in a life-critical situation. Events like these are definitely troubling to me:
"Mr. Zannini was paralyzed. “I can’t feel my
body.” Mrs. Zannini called 911 and the paramedics came within
10 minutes of the call. They took Mr. Zannini by ambulance to
the emergency room at Henry Mayo Medical Center in Newhall,
where his initial surgery had been performed 11 days earlier. He
arrived in the emergency room at 5:25 p.m. . . .
Upon arrival, Mr. Zannini was seriously compromised. He was
acutely paralyzed with no motor strength and had no sensation
from the nipple line down. He had no anal reflex. He had a
priapism (an involuntary erection), a slow heartbeat, and low
blood pressure. Dr. Lee knew time is of the essence in every
patient who is paralyzed. At 5:26 p.m. she called a Code Trauma . . . .
Dr. Lee ordered
the MRI scans at 6:11 p.m. The plan was to determine if there
was pathology that could be corrected by surgery.
The MRI scanner was located in a separate building which
required medical staff to transport Mr. Zannini out of the emergency room, across a street. and into another building about
300 yards away. The MRI team had to be summoned to the
hospital. The MRI technician arrived at 6:50 p.m.
In the meantime, Mr. Zannini was in the emergency room
experiencing, in addition to his paralysis, difficulty breathing,
severely low heartbeat, and low blood pressure. . . . However, the
MRI technicians could not take Mr. Zannini to the MRI suite and
put him into the scanner unless he was medically stable; to
remain stable, Mr. Zannini needed the Levophed infusion during
the MRI. The Levophed pump had to be MRI compatible. The
hospital did not have a compatible pump readily available. By
the time hospital staff located a compatible pump and Mr.
Zannini was stabilized, it was 7:40 p.m. when he was finally
transported to the MRI scanner.
While Dr. Lee was trying to stabilize Mr. Zannini’s blood
pressure and staff looked for a compatible pump, Dr. Liker called
Dr. Mortazavi at 6:00 pm. to brief him on what was happening . . . .
He, Dr. Liker, and Dr. Yashar reviewed the
MRI scans on their phones. Dr. Mortazavi called the operating
room and the emergency room and told the staff to prep Mr.
Zannini for surgery and to be prepared to start surgery at 10:00
p.m. when he arrived. Dr. Mortazavi received a response from
the hospital that the operating room was not going to be available
for Mr. Zannini’s emergency surgery until 11:00 p.m. because
there was another operation in progress that would not be
finished until then. Mr. Mortazavi asked staff to bring in a
second operating room team; he was told that would take even
longer.
Both Dr. Liker and Dr. Mortazavi separately called the
hospital to no avail to try to expedite the surgery. Dr. Liker
called Mrs. Zannini to tell her that Dr. Mortazavi had decided on
surgery. Dr. Mortazavi called the hospital and told staff to have
Mr. Zannini in the operating room ready to proceed when he
arrived.
Now that he knew he could not start surgery until 11:00
p.m., Dr. Mortazavi drove a little more slowly and arrived at the
hospital at around 10:50 p.m. He was dismayed to find that Mr.
Zannini was still in the emergency room, not yet in the operating
room as he had requested. He yelled at the staff. Eventually Mr.
Zannini was taken to the operating room where Dr. Mortazavi
commenced surgery at 11:35 p.m. and removed the blood clot."
Not exactly what you want to happen when what's at stake is whether you're going to be paralyzed for the rest of your life, eh?
