December 3, 2005

Donald Brown and Michael Dailey successfully defended a Lexington vascular surgeon from charges of medical negligence during a surgery to fix complications from a prior operation.  The surgeon placed a catheter line to remedy the leaking bile, but the line also punctured the patient’s superior vena cava.  The physician ordered an x-ray to confirm the line’s proper placement.  Even though the x-ray indicated that the line was improperly placed, no one looked at the x-ray until after the patient had died of a build-up of fluid around the heart.  The defense took up the position that the doctor had carried out his responsibility by simply ordering the x-ray, and that death could not be irrefutably correlated with surgery.  The Fayette County jury agreed, returning a defense verdict on liability.