Surgeon sawed into woman’s femur to repair it but left a piece missing, Maine suit says
A doctor left a gap in a woman’s femur bone while performing a surgery to correct a hip replacement he had performed on her earlier, a Maine lawsuit says.
The empty space couldn’t heal on its own and required an additional surgery to stabilize the area, according to a lawsuit obtained by Bangor Daily News.
Now, Mary Shea of Milbridge, Maine, is suing the doctor and Northern Light Maine Coast Hospital for damages, saying the doctor committed medical malpractice in 2019. She filed the lawsuit Sept. 12.
“We disagree with the allegations in the complaint and will provide no further comment at this time,” a spokesperson for Northern Light Health wrote in a statement to McClatchy News.
Shea says the doctor replaced her right hip in February 2019.
Six weeks after her surgery, she went in for a follow-up appointment and took x-rays, the suit says. During the appointment, she told her doctor she was in pain and worried she wasn’t making progress, according to the lawsuit.
“She had been working with physical therapy twice a week in addition to doing daily exercises, but she still felt very weak,” the lawsuit says. “She had developed what looked like bruising around her right hip. She was walking with a lurched gait.”
Her doctor told her to work harder during physical therapy and said he would see her in two months, according to the suit. Shea said he also didn’t look at any of her x-rays during the appointment.
“For the next two months, she tried to work harder and push through the pain, because that is what he had told her to do,” the suit says. “She felt frustrated and depressed that she was not getting better.”
When she went in for her next appointment, they took x-rays again. This time, he noticed an anomaly, the suit says.
He told her the “hip prosthesis had ‘slipped,’ which was why she had not been improving at physical therapy,” according to the suit.
He pulled up the x-rays from her last appointment and noticed the slippage was visible in the last x-ray, according to the lawsuit.
He said he must have read the wrong x-ray before, according to the suit. He told Shea she needed surgery very soon to correct the issue.
In June 2019, the doctor performed the revision surgery. He had to saw through her femur bone to remove the component, then knit the bone back together with wire, the suit says.
However, an x-ray shown in the suit shows a gap in Shea’s bone. She says once he cut through her femur bone, he failed to piece it back together and left a gap greater than 1 centimeter in her bone that couldn’t heal on its own.
Months after the surgery that was supposed to correct the issue, Shea said she still experienced pain and mobility problems, and she needed a cane to walk.
Shea eventually switched doctors and got another surgery in December 2019 to add a stabilizing piece of hardware on her femur. The x-ray shows the new device and a gap in her femur bone that never healed.
The suit says the doctor’s failure to diagnose the prosthetic issue and the gap left in Shea’s bone after the revision surgery have created extraordinary medical expenses, economic loss, permanent impairment and disfigurement, and loss of enjoyment of life, among other issues.
The suit says the hospital is vicariously liable for the issue.
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