Anesthesia error leads to $28.7M verdict for LA County man

A Los Angeles County jury awarded $28.7 million to a man left paralyzed from a brain injury he suffered during a medical procedure to remove a fishbone from his throat.

Sean O'Neill, a partner at The Stalwart Law Group, and William Collins, a partner at the Law Offices of Marshall Silberberg, represented Antonio Leon, who, in 2018, underwent what was supposed to be a routine 10-minute procedure. Antonio Leon v. Georgia Bode M.D. et al., 19ST-CV-01640, (L.A. Super., filed Jan. 22, 2019)

"He was supposed to undergo monitored anesthesia care, which is the safest form of anesthesia because you are breathing on your own," O'Neill said.

A replacement anesthesiologist, Dr. Georgia Bode, was called in after the originally scheduled anesthesiologist was unavailable. According to the lawsuit, they paralyzed Leon for the procedure and attempted to intubate him but were unable to get oxygen to him.

"This goes on for about 45 minutes. They're unable to get him oxygen through intubation, so they have to keep bag ventilating him," O'Neill said. "Because they didn't have the reversal drug, Sugammadex, which would have reversed the paralysis immediately, they had to wait about 35 minutes for the drug to wear off until he finally started to breathe again on his own."

"Dr. Bode, for some unexplained reason, makes the dangerous decision to re-paralyze Antonio, which again stops him from breathing, and now he completely loses oxygen," O'Neill said. "His oxygen saturations go into the 30s, and they have to do an emergency tracheostomy to get him oxygenated. Normally, an intubation attempt takes 30 seconds. Here, they attempted unsuccessfully for 40 minutes before the tracheostomy."

"Due to the lack of oxygen during the procedure, he suffered an anoxic brain injury and was put into a medically induced coma for a couple of weeks where he had multiple seizures and prophylactic brain cooling," Collins said. "He woke up a couple of weeks later completely wheelchair-bound and bedbound."

Thomas F. McAndrews, a senior partner at Reback, McAndrews, Blessey LLP, represented Bode. "Both plaintiff's counsel did a very good job with a very good case where the defendant did not consent to settle the matter," McAndrews said Tuesday.

The other defendants, Los Angeles Community Hospital and Dr. James Jaber, were represented by Wood, Smith, Henning & Berman LLP. They settled their cases before the trial began.

While on the stand, Bode was questioned by O'Neill about why she placed Leon back under the paralytic after he was emerging from the first wave of anesthesia. She testified that she chose to do something unsafe rather than get into a "fistfight" with the surgeon, who she said hijacked her ability to make a decision for the well-being of the patient, court transcripts show.

"Even the judge couldn't believe what he had heard when she said that," O'Neill said. "We still have physicians continuing to practice medicine who are thinking about fist-fighting one another in an operating room while a patient is paralyzed on their operating table. This conduct should make people outraged."