Bimla Nayyar was 81 years old.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: A jury awarded $21 million to the family of an 81-year-old Indian American woman this week after they sued Oakwood Hospital in Dearborn, Michigan, for mistakenly operating on her brain when all she needed was a simple procedure on her jaw.
Bimla Nayyar never recovered from the 2012 surgery and died 60 days later, and although her family won the suit in Wayne County Circuit Court, Attorney Geoffrey Fieger told WWJ Newsradio 950 he plans to ask the state to look into this as a criminal case.
“In my 37 years of law practice I have never seen a more terrible, horrific case — what they did to a poor woman — and then lied about it,” Fieger said
Nayyar, of Belleville, Mich. was hospitalized at Oakwood Hospital in January 2012 for problems relating to a dislocation of her temporomandibular joint (TMJ).
Oakwood Hospital subsequently claimed that it mistakenly thought Nayyar was bleeding in her brain and needed an immediate brain operation.
In a sworn affidavit, Oakwood Hospital’s chief quality and patient safety officer described how hospital staff determined that the CT scan, which they thought had been done on Nayyar, was actually done on a different patient, reported Detroit free Press.
“According to their claim [the hospital] mixed up her [scans] and thought that she was another patient,” Fieger told Detroit’s local CBS affiliate, WWJ.
Thus, instead of having her jaw treated, she was taken to an operating room where five holes were drilled into her head and the right side of her skull was sawed out.
It was only at that point that Oakwood team realized that there was nothing wrong with her brain, yet they did not inform the family that they had operated on the wrong patient. PR Newswire reported that until she passed sixty days later, “she suffered horribly.”
Oakwood initially denied all responsibility, but after two years the hospital admitted that they had operated on the wrong patient while insisting they had done no harm to her.
Bloomfield Hills attorney Deborah Gordon, a prominent trial lawyer who has won several multimillion-dollar verdicts, told Detroit Free Press that the size of the jury’s award in this case is unusual for a patient of advanced age and likely reflects the strength of Fieger’s case.
Nayyar is survived by her husband, Ramesh Nayyar, two daughters, a son and several grandchildren.
Once Nayyar passed away, her family transported her ashes to her homeland, India, where they were spread at the holy River Ganges per Hindu tradition.
3 Comments
so what happened to the other woman who was supposed to get her brain fixed. She got her jaw fixed?
Holy crap!
Yikes.