The lines between conscious sedation, monitored anesthesia care, general anesthesia, and life-threatening central nervous system depression are blurry and thin.  As the death of Michael Jackson and prosecution of his personal physician has brought back into the spotlight (I hope), anesthesia medications like propofol are frighteningly dangerous if used improperly.  It’s not like taking an antihistamine and going to sleep for a couple hours. Even the “long acting” procedural sedation agents like Versed and Fentanyl work for at most an hour, whereas the short-acting agents like Propofol last for only a couple minutes.  They have to be constantly administered and the patient has to be constantly monitored.

We review a lot of medical malpractice cases, so it feels like I see the same tragic story once a month, either in the press or in cases at our firm. Recently, “parents of student who died after dental surgery sue for malpractice“:

The parents of a Woodstock teen who died 10 days after losing oxygen during a routine wisdom tooth surgery March 28 in Columbia are suing the anesthesiologist and the oral surgeon involved for medical malpractice, according to court records filed Nov. 30.

The suit claims that Dr. Krista Michelle Isaacs, the anesthesiologist, and Dr. Domenick Coletti, the oral surgeon, were negligent in their care of Olenick and failed to resuscitate her after her heart rate slowed to a “panic level” of 40 beats per minute and her body began losing oxygen.

Yahoo has an article examining the merits of wisdom tooth removal, but it seems the type of surgery wasn’t really the problem, nor the use of improper surgical techniques.  It happened to involve dental surgery, but it could have been any type of surgery; Ms. Olenick’s death was perhaps another example of anesthesia malpractice:

According to Dr. David Fowler, the state’s chief medical examiner, Olenick was first given a standard dose of anesthesia during the procedure that did not “get her deep enough so she was fully anesthetized.” More anesthesia was then administered by Isaacs, which was also standard procedure, Fowler said in an interview.

At approximately 8:05 a.m., Olenick began to experience bradycardia, or a slowing of her heart rate, according to the lawsuit. “A little while later, the oxygen saturation in her blood started dropping,” Fowler said. Shortly thereafter, according to the autopsy report, Olenick went into hypoxic arrest.

The part of Ms. Olenick’s story that raised my eyebrows is how the patient showed bradycardia and then a little later showed a drop in oxygen saturation followed by hypoxia and cardiac arrest.  Bradycardia is a known side-effect of many anesthesia agents (consider this 1997 study on propofol), including Versed, which was likely used in the oral surgery procedure.  (On a comment on a blog called “No Midazolam,” it appears Ms. Olenick’s mother confirmed that Versed was one of the drugs used.)

Once a patient under anesthesia shows bradycardia, that’s a medical emergency, and action needs to be taken immediately. Here’s a medical malpractice case from Texas describing a similar situation:

[D]uring surgery, Mark had progressive bradycardia, an abnormally slow beating of the heart, which is a condition that is consistent with inadequate ventilation. This condition can lead to cardiac arrest. According to Dr. Fromm, if Mark was in good health before the operation and if he had been well-ventilated during surgery, he would have survived a sudden cardiac arrest during the surgery.

Adequate ventilation is critical during any surgery under general surgery, and I suspect that it contributed to Ms. Olenick’s brain damage, but another issue jumps out at me.Continue Reading Anesthesia Complications In Routine Surgery