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There are many medical errors that can be sued against a hospital. But this case is truly unique, as a patient decided to sue a hospital because his caregivers lost a piece of his skull.
Fernando Cluster filed a negligence lawsuit this month against an Atlanta hospital. The complaint alleges that the hospital was negligent in losing a piece of his skull that was removed during emergency brain surgery in 2022. To put the story in context, we need to go back to September 2022 when Fernando Cluster suffered an intracerebral hemorrhage. This is a potentially fatal type of stroke caused by bleeding in the brain.
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Shortly after his diagnosis, he underwent a decompressive hemicraniectomy at Emory University Hospital Midtown in Atlanta. The procedure involved removing part of the patient’s skull, and another procedure was planned to reimplant the bone fragment. However, when it came time to perform the cranioplasty to put the 12 x 15 centimeter bone fragment back in place, the hospital’s medical staff reportedly couldn’t find it. Because of the loss, the procedure had to be delayed for nearly two weeks.
And instead of replacing the bone fragment, doctors had to use a synthetic material to fill in the missing part of the patient’s skull. This replacement was reportedly billed to the patient for $19,000. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned as the synthetic material became infected and Cluster had to undergo another surgery. Faced with all these twists and turns, the 62-year-old man filed a lawsuit against Emory Healthcare seeking compensation for the ” physical and emotional damage ” that he had suffered. Furthermore, a 17 cm surgical tool was left in the womb of a woman 18 months after her cesarean section.
