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Malpractice verdict exceeds $2.8-million

The 53 year-old patient
died soon after vein surgery.
A jury blames the four surgeons.

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BY STEPHEN NOHLGREN
Times Staff Writer

CLEARWATER - For nine days after his 1991 surgery at Morton Plant Hospital, William Perry was in pain. He could give himself a painkiller, up to four times an hour, by pushing a button on a bedside pump.

Nursing notes show that the Clearwater house painter pushed the button 1,500 times before dying a few days later.

For Gina Perry, steady pain was just one of several signs that something had gone seriously amiss with her father's surgery. She telephoned his doctor's office 20 times in eight days, she said, before she was finally told that the doctor was on vacation and his colleagues were overseeing her father's recovery.

On Friday, a six-member Pinellas Circuit Court jury agreed that medical malpractice led to William Perry's death. They awarded his daughter $2 million in damages, $800,000 in attorney fees, and $79,000 in medical and burial expenses.

"On behalf of our client, we are very grateful," said Palm Harbor attorney Thomas Carey, who represented Gina Perry. "As far as we know, this is the second largest judgment in Pinellas history," said co-counsel H. Dennis Rogers.

"This is a tragedy. These are the best doctors Clearwater has to offer and they did nothing wrong," said Tampa attorney William Hahn, who represented surgeons William Maistrellis, F.R. May, Allen H. Haydon and Peter Blumencranz.

Together, the doctors had performed this surgery 1,800 times without ever losing a patient, Hahn said. Nationally, the death rate from complications is 1 to 2 per cent, he said.

"We like to think that doctors can do everything for us. But they are not God."

The jury held Maistrellis and Blumencranz each responsible for 30 percent of the award and May and Haydon each responsible for 20 percent. The doctors left the courtroom immediately after the verdict and were unavailable for comment.

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Perry, 53, checked into Morton Plant because of chronic pain in his legs, caused by hardening of the arteries.

The operation, Called an aortobifemoral bypass, replaces a section of artery in the abdomen, which increases blood flow to the legs to ease the pain.

According to attorneys on both sides, a possible side-effect is that the blood supply to the colon can shut down. When that happens, the colon must be removed or eventually might burst and cause almost certainly lethal infection.

Nine days after the operation, doctors discovered that Perry's colon tissue was dead because it wasn't receiving blood. When and why it stopped getting blood was a central issue in the suit.

According to Hahn, Perry progressed well after surgery. He had some abdominal pain, but that was to be expected. His vital signs were close to normal and didn't vary much until just before his death. He walked around some on the fourth day after surgery.

"He was progressing day by day," he said.

If the surgery had shut down the blood supply, Hahn said, grave symptoms would have shown up within a day or two - like bleeding and wildly fluctuating blood pressure and blood counts.

Since that didn't happen, the blood supply to the colon must have shut down well after surgery. "Why? It's a mystery," he said.

Carey and Rogers argued that the doctors overlooked plenty of signs. Pain, a hardened abdomen, blood in Perry's stool and fluid gain.

When the dead colon tissue was finally discovered, Perry had gained 21 pounds in retained fluids, Carey said.

"He -was getting worse and dying and they treated him like a statistic, just like anyone else," Carey said.

Gina Perry, now 29, was attending pharmacy school when her father died. He supported her financially and helped care for her young son while she was in school. When he died, she had to drop out of school and clean houses and offices to support herself, she said.

He died on her birthday.

"I'm glad that people now know that what happened to him was wrong," she said.