LAKE CHARLES, La. (Legal Newsline) - Caregivers who spent more than an hour trying to save a 9-month-old who swallowed a penny aren’t liable for his death from a rare complication of the procedure to remove it, a Louisiana appeals court ruled.
Larry Collier III was hospitalized four times after his birth in December 2008 for asthma and pneumonia. The last time, in October 2009, he was discharged with a diagnosis of viral pneumonia and instructions for his parents, Taquette Crawford and Larry Collier, to continue him on prescription medications.
A week later, on Oct. 21, his parents took him to the Sabine Medical Center emergency room, where his mother said he could “hardly breathe.” The nurse noted a “whistle type sound” when he coughed. Dr. Charles Pearson noted stridor, or a whistling sound, but not wheezing. He also identified a foreign body, later determined to be a penny, in his esophagus.
Dr.Khalid Ghorab removed the penny in a 12-minute procedure, but then the baby stopped breathing by himself and after an hour and six minutes of attempted resuscitation, he was pronounced dead. The autopsy listed the cause of death as bronchospasm triggered by removing a foreign body.
The parents sought a medical board review while they prepared a malpractice suit, which they filed in February 2013 against Sabine Medical, Dr. Ghorab and Dr. Pearson. The medical review panel concluded in February 2014 that Dr. Ghorab and Sabine Medical had met the standard of care but the plaintiffs took the case to trial anyway.
During the bench trial, the parents' expert, Dr. Mark Levin, said Larry’s shortness of breath and whistling were caused by asthma, not the penny, and it needed to be controlled before surgery or the child risked desaturation, or a drop in blood oxygen. Dr. Levin also said Sabine Medical was liable because it didn’t have a physician anesthetist in place.
The defendants argued Dr. Levin was an internist and oncologist with no experience treating children. Defense expert Dr. Dean Edell said he’d performed some 7,000 bronchoscopies and Larry died from an extremely rare complication caused by a “cascade of events.” Asked about the plaintiff expert, Dr. Edell said “his understanding of the pediatric airway and some of his statements …I’m just speechless, I just don’t even know how to comment.”
Sabine Parish Judge Stephen Beasley ruled for the defense and the plaintiffs appealed. But Louisiana’s Third Circuit Court of Appeal upheld the verdict in an opinion by Judge John Conery.
“The trial court plainly did not accept the opinions offered by Dr. Levin, Plaintiffs’ expert,” the appeals court concluded. “In such an instance of conflicting expert opinions concerning compliance with the standard of care, an appellate court affords great discretion to the trier of fact.”