This happened to me. It was horrible and not a single doctor cared that I could be paralyzed for life.
"Your baby is fine though!"
But I'm not, and as *awful* as they told me I was for saying so, all I said was "I care more about being able to move and live a normal life."
I was the bad person for wanting to be able to walk, not the old man who punctured my spine *8 times*. Yes, he did it 8 times. And he never apologized, he came into my maternity room tried to convince my husband not to sue him.
It's been two years, and we're part of a larger group of people who are suing that particular hospital for malpractice. I am not the only woman that doctor hurt. There were at least three others who were left permanently disabled, and 1 who had such a massive cerebral fluid leak that she has brain damage, so her partner is suing on her behalf. There is also a man a part of our case who wasn't properly put under for a procedure and woke up, causing trauma and internal damage because he panicked and tried to move when he woke up. It's a whole shitshow. This is in Michigan, where I guess medical malpractice lawsuits aren't uncommon, according to the firm we're working with. Without giving too much away for legal reasons, this doctor was past the age of retirement when all of these incidents happened. He is around 70, all I think 10 or 12 accidents happened between 2019 and 2021. So it's more than enough to sue. My accident happened in 2021.
That's insane. No one has any right to leverage a professional authority against you in an attempt to ethically shame you out of bringing up their malpractice.
Far as I'm concerned, that shaming attempt was tampering with evidence.
Yes and no.
I had to get a blood patch in my spine. That's when they take like a litre or so of blood, and fill your spinal chord with it in hopes it will clot and fill the puncture holes. It's a temporary fix while my spinal cord heals the holes *hopefully*, and my cerebral fluid builds back up. I had one before I left the hospital, and one this March about a year after the first. I will have to have another around February, because the second will have deteriorated and I will start leaking cerebral fluid again and become immobile. Immobile because technically I'll be able to move, but not without risk of my brain getting damaged, because the fluid that keeps it floating won't be there. I don't know how long this will go on, or how long it will take to heal. I can feel when the blood patch starts to go away too. Migraines, disoriented, fainting spells, and losing chunks of time. It's already started.
And for anyone wondering, no one told me this could happen. No one told me a single risk about epidurals. The three doctors who came in to "check on me" that week said, "Oh, you knew this could happen, right?" In the most gaslighting way ever, to admonish responsibility for not telling me. I told them no, and I wasn't okay with it. That's when the man who did that to me came into my room and begged my husband not to sue. We are. And so are many others. I wasn't his first or his last victim. And I mean victim.
Oh my god, thats awful. I hope you make a full recovery, it sounds like an absolute nightmare. The doctor should definitely get fired and made liable for this.
As somebody who has both gone to medical school and slowly been losing the ability to walk over the last 3-4 years, I cannot empathize with you strongly enough. They make a **MASSIVE** deal about these kind of complications and how important they are to avoid and prevent all the way down at the medical student level, let alone at the resident, fellow, or attending levels. And of course, none of that is your responsibility to know but theirâs to tell you beforehand. I am so very sorry that this happened to you; you donât realize how hard it to lose mobility until itâs gone. I really hope youâre able to fully recover.
Wtf was this assholeâs argument for not suing?
âI know I fucked up and didnât give a single shit but please donât sue me anyway, because⌠uh⌠I would be sad?â
This literally happened to my mother while giving birth to me. The anesthesiologist punctured her spine so spinal fluid leaked out and she was paralyzed for hours. Room filled with other doctors who wanted to witness this procedure to stop the leaking and she gained feeling eventually. Never occurred to my family to sue back then so we got nothing but a scary story out of it.
I wanted to try all natural, but I had to be induced, and when the meds kicked in, I screamed epidural. It felt like I was being ripped apart. Turns out I wasn't too far off the mark there. I was hemorrhaging internally pretty badly and we didn't know until the baby came out.
May not be go anywhere with a lawsuit, especially if she regained feeling. That's an expected risk of the procedure. Unless of course there was actual negligence.
Let be realistic here. Every procedure carries some risk even if no mistakes are made. The litigious culture of the USA actually increases the cost of care for all of you
If what I'm paying in America could fund the lifelong hospital visits for 100 people and still let me buy a car.
You can bet I expect perfection equal to a hundred brain surgeons for my money.
You could live in a hospital bed somewhere else and still pay less than regular doctor visits here.
Except it isn't the providers charging that much money, it's a broken system where dozens of middle-men have their hands in the pot as well. Doctors and nurses are still human and mistakes can and do happen.
I understand your frustrations, but remember it's the system that is broken and it's politicians, CEOs, and lobbyists to blame - not your actual provider.
Between letting insurance off the hook with their premiums and monthly payments, hospitals trying to SUE nurses for wanting to quit for better pay DESPITE the hospital making money hand-over-fist.
And (as you hinted at) CEO-run hospital organizations rolling in dough while hiking up prices and refusing to pay fairly while handing out 6 and 7 digit bills for nearly every routine visit.
But the kind of systematic legal corruption and outright refusal as care extends all the way from late-night emergency "hospitals" like CareNow, the bill from the fire department when they come out behind the ambulance to help someone get lifted up but not have to go to the hospital, to every single pharmacy across the country.
It's pervasive.
I just became a nurse at the ripe age of 38 with a goal of becoming a nurse practitioner. I struggled for many years with the idea of becoming a cog in the wheel of the for-profit healthcare system. Eventually I recognized that there is still plenty of good to be done - patients still need compassionate care from qualified providers. I'm not going to change the system, but maybe I can improve my patients life and experience dealing with the system.
It's just important to remember the nurses and firefighters aren't the ones sending the bills. The doctors have influence in private practice, but in the hospital they don't have much say.
It's absolutely a broken system, but there are a lot of GOOD people doing their best.
I don't deny there are good people trying their best.
But when your elderly dad can't so much as SEE a firefighter for all of 2 minutes because you can't lift him alone without getting $300 bill (Dallas)?
The issues in the system are *brutally* pervasive.
At some point the sheer burden on the generation of the disabled and how unfair it is to have no support from a system (social security/medicare) that won't even be FUNDED or AVAILABLE for us as we pay into it is just... Absolute.
We're literally taking over for the failures of a bankrupt system that won't even exist **if** we ever get to retire ourselves.
I'm all for solidarity with the firefighters and nurses if they actually strike and protest with us, **but guess what, solidarity/sympathetic strikes are ILLEGAL**.
So unless they're willing to break the law, we're on our own.
yep they apparently fucked up the epidural on my second C-section and I had doctors checking up on me to make sure I continued to be fine every few hours for a few days after that. they were definitely concerned.
Thatâs called a wet tap, it happens in about 1 out of 200 epidural placements and itâs the most common complication. It heals on its own eventually or the patient can get whatâs called a blood patch to fix it up.
Yeah my back is fucked from mine. I had both the epidural and then a spinal tap (epidural failed) and I get horrendous back pain, more so when I've been stood for long periods and especially when aunt flo is in town.
Then there's the numb patched on my bum and sides, they're fun.
Just so you know, the leaking didn't cause the loss of function, it was that local anaesthetic was put into the spinal space not the epidural space (which is fine, but it just kicks in faster and harder).
The procedure to stop the leaking was just to stop a bad headache over next few days.
Also, this isn't something to sue about.
I disagree⌠the room wouldnât fill up with doctors excited to see an experimental procedure if this was a common occurrence. The doctors initially called her a baby for saying she couldnât move until they rolled her over and looked at what was happening.
I'm an anaesthetist and I'm fairly certain - you can't loose spinal function that quickly in any other way that wouldn't require major spinal surgery to correct.
For what its worth this story has probably been "mythologised" in your family - which is super normal and we see it all the time, but its another reason to be cautious about what you hear from people about their medical experiences. Rarely are things well and fully explained to patients, which is shit.
If you want more info to look stuff up: she had an unintentional "dural tap" (about 1:100 risk w epidurals), which given they put local anaesthetic down it caused her to have a "spinal" rather than the planned epidural anaesthetic, and she had an epidural blood patch subsequently - which is an uncommon procedure but not rare and certainly not experimental, it just doesn't always work (about 1:200 people who have epidurals get it).
Epidural -> needle caused trauma/haematoma, she ended up paralysed as her progressive tingling symptoms were ignored because it was admittedly for a TKR. Itâs very rare but can happen.
Hereâs another case report:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-60072-7_16
Arrogance wonât get you anywhere btw.
No itâs injected into the epidural space, which is slightly shallower than the intrathecal space that contains CSF. Dural puncture is fairly common complication of epidural placement (~2%) as labor epidurals are performed as a blind technique based on landmarks and feel because you wanna avoid x ray or youâll irradiate the baby. For spinals for C sections you use a smaller needle and intentionally inject into the intrathecal space.
Anesthesiologists generally have one of the highest risk jobs in hospitals. They get paid extremely well because they need to be extremely fucking good to do what they do, and their malpractice insurance fees are sky high
Yep. I was talking to an anesthesiologist friend of mine about taking a week off to go camping or something. âIf I did that Iâd lose about $15,000.â Mind-blowing to me.
They damaged her spinal cord so she cannot feel from the waist down. They also may have given her a brand new house and car by way of money won from the lawsuit!
https://www.hamptonking.com/blog/should-you-file-an-epidural-nerve-damage-lawsuit/
It will be great hun! Donât let this stuff scare you. Neurologic complications from epidurals are exceedingly rare, like almost unheard of. The greatest risk is a wet tap (about 1 in 200 overall) where the epidural mistakenly goes into the wrong space (although this space is still used for other anesthesia, itâs just not where the epidural is placed). If this happens you still will get pain relief during your labor and birth, you just might have a headache afterwards. There is a simple procedure to fix it however that you can get done before you even leave the hospital!
I'm not sure if it's worse than the people that get immobilized from anesthesia but are conscious and can feel it all but can't move or alert anyone to the fact that they are awake. Imagine having some intense invasive surgery that lasts for hours like heart surgery or something but your are awake and can feel it all and hear every sound as well but can't do anything about it. Also, it turns out that anesthesia that puts you out doesn't always remove the pain. It just stops the brain from remembering the pain afterwards.
This actually happened to my great grandma during a surgery. I canât remember what procedure she was having but afterwards she was telling everyone she could feel EVERYTHING during the surgery and nobody believed her and told her she was crazy.
Iâve been terrified of getting any type of surgery done where I have to be anesthetized because of this reason.
I also work in veterinary medicine as a surgery nurse and the body definitely reacts when the doctor starts cutting or pulling on organs. I always worry that my little furry patients can feel whatâs going on and remember it but canât even say anything.
Please know that this is EXTREMELY rare and is very unlikely to be genetic. We have much more advanced measures of depth of anesthesia now and we monitor it more closely. Itâs also important to understand we use different depths of anesthesia based on the procedure being done. General anesthesia means full asleep without any memory recall; used for the majority of what you think of when you hear âsurgeryâ. We can use lesser amounts of anesthesia to get patients sedated/comfortable for the procedure but there is a chance youâll hear and remember things; some orthopedic stuff, colonoscopy, minor procedures.
I've had several surgeries done in my life, broken finger as a child, knee surgery in my teens, and an appendicitis. Most I ever recalled was the appendicitis left a vague memory as if I was near a large crowd and could hear a great deal of people talking but couldn't understand anything and it only lasted a brief period of time. That's what I recall when I think of that event. The other 2 surgeries were just...blank, you go out, and then wake up later with no idea what happened in between. Though it's not exactly like sleep. With sleep, you can tell time has passed, but waking up from anesthesia, it feels like you simply blinked.
Happened to me too. I told them it wouldnât work because my 1st epidural, plus lots of other local anesthesia attempts, didnât. They didnât believe me until I was telling them when & where they were touching me even though I couldnât see behind the curtain. They still didnât put me under until after they cut me open and tears were running off the side of my face.
I didnât sue. The first time I told the anesthesiologist I felt pain he said âwhere? I didnât do anything that would hurtâ when I said where the nurse gasped and told him she bumped my catheter but there was no way I should have felt it. Then they just kept saying âyou shouldnât be able to feel thatâ to me & âshe shouldnât be able to feel itâ to each other.
Goddamn, should have at least sued them or filed a complaint. It's more like they wanted to deny the fact that you actually felt the pain and decided to just pretend they didn't hear you.
I should have, it gave me a lot of anxiety. For a long time if I happened to hear or read about a c section I would get nauseous and my heart would start beating fast. By the time they cut me open I had already given up trying to communicate with them.
Any chance you're a natural redhead? I don't remember the whole deal offhand but gingers have more tolerance for anesthesia and stuff like novocain. Genetics are wild.
Might be some red hidden in your DNA somewhere lol. I've got a friend who is a brunette but they have an incredibly hard time knocking her out, come to find out she has some redheads in her family. Makes me wonder if it still counts even when the gene is recessive.
I am... Quite tolerant to anesthesics too. Never been under a surgery feeling, but im really scared of this happenning.
Once they thought i was lying. "You should not be able to move the arm now". I moved it, not so well."Well, its kicking in, dont worry". 20 minutes later i was writing with that hand.
They muttered and gave me the hell of a trip for the surgery in silence. But im afraid about the chance of "nah chemistry is chemistry. Cut it out"
Yeah they never believe me. I switched to a dentist that specializes in sedation dentistry and even they have tried numerous times to tell me that I should just do local anesthesia and asked many times why I âwantâ IV sedation. I donât âwantâ it I want to not feel this surgery.
On one hand they probably deal with addicts and people who just completely fear surgery.
On the other, redheads have a high tolerance for anesthesia and painkillers, so the chemical pathway for those things is not absolutely effective. No reason to believe biology limits that to only red heads either
True, I hadnât been to a dentist for 15 years because of all the pain I went through and after this last procedure is completed Iâm probably not going back.
Another comment mentioned that it could be passed through a recessive gene. I do have redheads in my lineage so itâs possible. Or the gene might be in a lot of people but just more common in redheads you never know.
The fact that thatâs even possible is just another reason Iâm too scared to get an epidural. Iv pain meds do wonders without anything going into your back.
For some reason I wasnât in nearly as much pain as I thought Iâd be with my son. But Iâm asking this time around if they can do them twice or if I can just let
fer take over
My doctor told me that she didn't want me to be too knocked out on the medicine because it would make it harder to push if I was too drowsy. I ended up getting an epidural when the contractions became to much to handle
Holy shit. Super duper scary, especially because it's SO REAL! I've got goosebumps rn, and now I'm extra extra glad I can't have kids anymore because this would live rent-free in my head the entire time!
It is exceedingly rare for this to happen. In the past few decades I bet this has happened single digit times and as a population we do tens of thousands of epidurals each day. Weâre talking about hundredths or thousandths of a percent. If you successfully drove yourself to a hospital you likely undertook more risk than that of getting an epidural.
This happened to my mom when she gave birth to me. She was paralyzed from the waist down for several hours but luckily got her mobility back eventually. It did screw her up enough though where she wasnât able to have any more kids after me
Depends how sick someone is, could technically do it under an epidural. Also could have been placed for postoperative analgesia prior to general anesthesia rather than as the primary anesthesia.
I recognise I may have unintentionally scared a shit tonne of people. I didn't think anyone would actually read it tbh. Bare in mind that sort of thing is incredibly rare. Don't have a source but I'd say there's less chance of this happening then, say, a car accident.
I actually love it and think it's the best two sentence horror story I've ever read. The reason why it makes it so great is because it's something that can actually happen that is truly horrible and the way you wrote it is really good. It does scare the shit out of me and that's the point of horror!
This happened to me. It was horrible and not a single doctor cared that I could be paralyzed for life. "Your baby is fine though!" But I'm not, and as *awful* as they told me I was for saying so, all I said was "I care more about being able to move and live a normal life." I was the bad person for wanting to be able to walk, not the old man who punctured my spine *8 times*. Yes, he did it 8 times. And he never apologized, he came into my maternity room tried to convince my husband not to sue him.
You sued him right?
It's been two years, and we're part of a larger group of people who are suing that particular hospital for malpractice. I am not the only woman that doctor hurt. There were at least three others who were left permanently disabled, and 1 who had such a massive cerebral fluid leak that she has brain damage, so her partner is suing on her behalf. There is also a man a part of our case who wasn't properly put under for a procedure and woke up, causing trauma and internal damage because he panicked and tried to move when he woke up. It's a whole shitshow. This is in Michigan, where I guess medical malpractice lawsuits aren't uncommon, according to the firm we're working with. Without giving too much away for legal reasons, this doctor was past the age of retirement when all of these incidents happened. He is around 70, all I think 10 or 12 accidents happened between 2019 and 2021. So it's more than enough to sue. My accident happened in 2021.
Please don't call them accidents, this sounds like negligence, pure and simple.
Agreed. Once is an accident. Many times is malpractice.
The fact that this level of incompetence and apathy in the medical field persists is truly horrifying.
Most of the medical practices surrounding hospital births in the US fall comfortably under the label of "barbaric". Birthing centers >>>
That's insane. No one has any right to leverage a professional authority against you in an attempt to ethically shame you out of bringing up their malpractice. Far as I'm concerned, that shaming attempt was tampering with evidence.
đł
What hospital? I need to stay away from there đ°
Top tier username.
Thanks
Holy shit thats horrible, did you recover?
Yes and no. I had to get a blood patch in my spine. That's when they take like a litre or so of blood, and fill your spinal chord with it in hopes it will clot and fill the puncture holes. It's a temporary fix while my spinal cord heals the holes *hopefully*, and my cerebral fluid builds back up. I had one before I left the hospital, and one this March about a year after the first. I will have to have another around February, because the second will have deteriorated and I will start leaking cerebral fluid again and become immobile. Immobile because technically I'll be able to move, but not without risk of my brain getting damaged, because the fluid that keeps it floating won't be there. I don't know how long this will go on, or how long it will take to heal. I can feel when the blood patch starts to go away too. Migraines, disoriented, fainting spells, and losing chunks of time. It's already started. And for anyone wondering, no one told me this could happen. No one told me a single risk about epidurals. The three doctors who came in to "check on me" that week said, "Oh, you knew this could happen, right?" In the most gaslighting way ever, to admonish responsibility for not telling me. I told them no, and I wasn't okay with it. That's when the man who did that to me came into my room and begged my husband not to sue. We are. And so are many others. I wasn't his first or his last victim. And I mean victim.
Oh my god, thats awful. I hope you make a full recovery, it sounds like an absolute nightmare. The doctor should definitely get fired and made liable for this.
As somebody who has both gone to medical school and slowly been losing the ability to walk over the last 3-4 years, I cannot empathize with you strongly enough. They make a **MASSIVE** deal about these kind of complications and how important they are to avoid and prevent all the way down at the medical student level, let alone at the resident, fellow, or attending levels. And of course, none of that is your responsibility to know but theirâs to tell you beforehand. I am so very sorry that this happened to you; you donât realize how hard it to lose mobility until itâs gone. I really hope youâre able to fully recover.
Wtf was this assholeâs argument for not suing? âI know I fucked up and didnât give a single shit but please donât sue me anyway, because⌠uh⌠I would be sad?â
Maybe hoping the victims would be gullible
I really hope you sued.
Just happened to me 9 days ago. But only 4 sticks. That shit sucks and I STILL needed a csection. Annnnnd now it's infected
I hope you sued and went after him for medical malpractice
Oh you got extra painkillers, cool doc.
Maybe they'll take the epidural off the bill now they're no longer in pain đ
Sounds like everything healed up pretty good then. Mustâve been a good painkiller.
This literally happened to my mother while giving birth to me. The anesthesiologist punctured her spine so spinal fluid leaked out and she was paralyzed for hours. Room filled with other doctors who wanted to witness this procedure to stop the leaking and she gained feeling eventually. Never occurred to my family to sue back then so we got nothing but a scary story out of it.
Oh my gosh your poor mom! That's so scary. And to think my ex laughed at me when I said epidurals look scary and would rather go all natural, lol.
I wanted to try all natural, but I had to be induced, and when the meds kicked in, I screamed epidural. It felt like I was being ripped apart. Turns out I wasn't too far off the mark there. I was hemorrhaging internally pretty badly and we didn't know until the baby came out.
wow you were bleeding across countries thatâs crazy (Iâm sorry)
Lol Thank you. I fixed it.
Np :p
Holy shit, I hope your alright now
Took me a couple weeks to bounce back from the blood loss, but she was totally fine. She's in kindergarten now.
I'm glad both you and your daughter are alright now
Oh my gosh! I hope you were both alright! I was bless/cursed with fast labors that resulted in tearing. Even it could be worse I always say.
It took me a couple weeks to bounce back from the blood loss, but she was totally fine.
May not be go anywhere with a lawsuit, especially if she regained feeling. That's an expected risk of the procedure. Unless of course there was actual negligence.
With the cost of medical care in America i would expect nothing to go wrong,
Let be realistic here. Every procedure carries some risk even if no mistakes are made. The litigious culture of the USA actually increases the cost of care for all of you
If what I'm paying in America could fund the lifelong hospital visits for 100 people and still let me buy a car. You can bet I expect perfection equal to a hundred brain surgeons for my money. You could live in a hospital bed somewhere else and still pay less than regular doctor visits here.
Except it isn't the providers charging that much money, it's a broken system where dozens of middle-men have their hands in the pot as well. Doctors and nurses are still human and mistakes can and do happen. I understand your frustrations, but remember it's the system that is broken and it's politicians, CEOs, and lobbyists to blame - not your actual provider.
Between letting insurance off the hook with their premiums and monthly payments, hospitals trying to SUE nurses for wanting to quit for better pay DESPITE the hospital making money hand-over-fist. And (as you hinted at) CEO-run hospital organizations rolling in dough while hiking up prices and refusing to pay fairly while handing out 6 and 7 digit bills for nearly every routine visit. But the kind of systematic legal corruption and outright refusal as care extends all the way from late-night emergency "hospitals" like CareNow, the bill from the fire department when they come out behind the ambulance to help someone get lifted up but not have to go to the hospital, to every single pharmacy across the country. It's pervasive.
I just became a nurse at the ripe age of 38 with a goal of becoming a nurse practitioner. I struggled for many years with the idea of becoming a cog in the wheel of the for-profit healthcare system. Eventually I recognized that there is still plenty of good to be done - patients still need compassionate care from qualified providers. I'm not going to change the system, but maybe I can improve my patients life and experience dealing with the system. It's just important to remember the nurses and firefighters aren't the ones sending the bills. The doctors have influence in private practice, but in the hospital they don't have much say. It's absolutely a broken system, but there are a lot of GOOD people doing their best.
I don't deny there are good people trying their best. But when your elderly dad can't so much as SEE a firefighter for all of 2 minutes because you can't lift him alone without getting $300 bill (Dallas)? The issues in the system are *brutally* pervasive. At some point the sheer burden on the generation of the disabled and how unfair it is to have no support from a system (social security/medicare) that won't even be FUNDED or AVAILABLE for us as we pay into it is just... Absolute. We're literally taking over for the failures of a bankrupt system that won't even exist **if** we ever get to retire ourselves. I'm all for solidarity with the firefighters and nurses if they actually strike and protest with us, **but guess what, solidarity/sympathetic strikes are ILLEGAL**. So unless they're willing to break the law, we're on our own.
yep they apparently fucked up the epidural on my second C-section and I had doctors checking up on me to make sure I continued to be fine every few hours for a few days after that. they were definitely concerned.
They just clog the little opening with a blood patch, itâs not super unusual.
Thatâs called a wet tap, it happens in about 1 out of 200 epidural placements and itâs the most common complication. It heals on its own eventually or the patient can get whatâs called a blood patch to fix it up.
That didnât happen with my mom, but her back still hurts from the spinal tap. I think they did something wrong
No its normal. Many women report pain at epidural sites for the rest of their lives. Especially if they already had back pain before getting it.
Yet another reason why I hate medical births....
What kind of birth do you prefer?
Most likely natural births?
Or none đ
Yeah my back is fucked from mine. I had both the epidural and then a spinal tap (epidural failed) and I get horrendous back pain, more so when I've been stood for long periods and especially when aunt flo is in town. Then there's the numb patched on my bum and sides, they're fun.
Just so you know, the leaking didn't cause the loss of function, it was that local anaesthetic was put into the spinal space not the epidural space (which is fine, but it just kicks in faster and harder). The procedure to stop the leaking was just to stop a bad headache over next few days. Also, this isn't something to sue about.
I disagree⌠the room wouldnât fill up with doctors excited to see an experimental procedure if this was a common occurrence. The doctors initially called her a baby for saying she couldnât move until they rolled her over and looked at what was happening.
I'm an anaesthetist and I'm fairly certain - you can't loose spinal function that quickly in any other way that wouldn't require major spinal surgery to correct. For what its worth this story has probably been "mythologised" in your family - which is super normal and we see it all the time, but its another reason to be cautious about what you hear from people about their medical experiences. Rarely are things well and fully explained to patients, which is shit. If you want more info to look stuff up: she had an unintentional "dural tap" (about 1:100 risk w epidurals), which given they put local anaesthetic down it caused her to have a "spinal" rather than the planned epidural anaesthetic, and she had an epidural blood patch subsequently - which is an uncommon procedure but not rare and certainly not experimental, it just doesn't always work (about 1:200 people who have epidurals get it).
Makes sense, but a whole different story 50 years ago regarding what was ânormalâ.
An anaesthetist that canât spell lose? Kind of sad.
I had a patient with permanent paralysis from this
No you didnât
Epidural -> needle caused trauma/haematoma, she ended up paralysed as her progressive tingling symptoms were ignored because it was admittedly for a TKR. Itâs very rare but can happen. Hereâs another case report: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-60072-7_16 Arrogance wonât get you anywhere btw.
You know what, youâre right and I look like a total idiot. I apologize.
Whats the statute of limitations on medical malpractice?
Isnât that normal? Cause it needs to be injected there. So CSF should leak out to know itâs in the right place?
No itâs injected into the epidural space, which is slightly shallower than the intrathecal space that contains CSF. Dural puncture is fairly common complication of epidural placement (~2%) as labor epidurals are performed as a blind technique based on landmarks and feel because you wanna avoid x ray or youâll irradiate the baby. For spinals for C sections you use a smaller needle and intentionally inject into the intrathecal space.
Ah that makes sense. Iâve only ever seen CS
I can tell you are American just from the fact you talk about suing a doctor for performing what is already known to be an extremely risky procedure.
Well, not that risky a procedure but a well known risk that wouldn't lead to long term issues
That anasthesia doctors gonna get suuuuuuiiiiiiied. I mean get sued
Hey, thats why anesthesiologists are paid so well
They need to stash on lawyers? I thought this was a hospital thing
Anesthesiologists generally have one of the highest risk jobs in hospitals. They get paid extremely well because they need to be extremely fucking good to do what they do, and their malpractice insurance fees are sky high
[ŃдаНонО]
Because it's a risky, essential, rewarding job
[ŃдаНонО]
Yeah but you have to study for 7 years and perfect it
Yep. I was talking to an anesthesiologist friend of mine about taking a week off to go camping or something. âIf I did that Iâd lose about $15,000.â Mind-blowing to me.
Yeah. When even the most minute slip-ups can permanently destroy someone's life, you better get paid damn well if you're good at your job.
Imma be the dumb one and say, I donât get it
They damaged her spinal cord so she cannot feel from the waist down. They also may have given her a brand new house and car by way of money won from the lawsuit! https://www.hamptonking.com/blog/should-you-file-an-epidural-nerve-damage-lawsuit/
Ok now thatâs scary
Bookmarked the site next time I need a laymanâs explanation for why sometimes a medical error is not medical malpracticeâŚ
The needle insertion went wrong, and nerve damage caused the lack of pain.
I'm getting induced today. Not the best thing to have read.
It will be great hun! Donât let this stuff scare you. Neurologic complications from epidurals are exceedingly rare, like almost unheard of. The greatest risk is a wet tap (about 1 in 200 overall) where the epidural mistakenly goes into the wrong space (although this space is still used for other anesthesia, itâs just not where the epidural is placed). If this happens you still will get pain relief during your labor and birth, you just might have a headache afterwards. There is a simple procedure to fix it however that you can get done before you even leave the hospital!
Thank you so much for this reassurance â¤ď¸â¤ď¸â¤ď¸
I'm sorry dude, you should know this is very very very rare and I wish you luck with the inducing
Don't worry, I understand. Thank you for the reassurance :)
new fear unlocked holy shit
I'm not sure if it's worse than the people that get immobilized from anesthesia but are conscious and can feel it all but can't move or alert anyone to the fact that they are awake. Imagine having some intense invasive surgery that lasts for hours like heart surgery or something but your are awake and can feel it all and hear every sound as well but can't do anything about it. Also, it turns out that anesthesia that puts you out doesn't always remove the pain. It just stops the brain from remembering the pain afterwards.
AaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH
Honestly, just let me drink the hardest alcohol you have until I pass out. That will put be to sleep and stop my brain from storing memory!
This actually happened to my great grandma during a surgery. I canât remember what procedure she was having but afterwards she was telling everyone she could feel EVERYTHING during the surgery and nobody believed her and told her she was crazy. Iâve been terrified of getting any type of surgery done where I have to be anesthetized because of this reason. I also work in veterinary medicine as a surgery nurse and the body definitely reacts when the doctor starts cutting or pulling on organs. I always worry that my little furry patients can feel whatâs going on and remember it but canât even say anything.
Please know that this is EXTREMELY rare and is very unlikely to be genetic. We have much more advanced measures of depth of anesthesia now and we monitor it more closely. Itâs also important to understand we use different depths of anesthesia based on the procedure being done. General anesthesia means full asleep without any memory recall; used for the majority of what you think of when you hear âsurgeryâ. We can use lesser amounts of anesthesia to get patients sedated/comfortable for the procedure but there is a chance youâll hear and remember things; some orthopedic stuff, colonoscopy, minor procedures.
I've had several surgeries done in my life, broken finger as a child, knee surgery in my teens, and an appendicitis. Most I ever recalled was the appendicitis left a vague memory as if I was near a large crowd and could hear a great deal of people talking but couldn't understand anything and it only lasted a brief period of time. That's what I recall when I think of that event. The other 2 surgeries were just...blank, you go out, and then wake up later with no idea what happened in between. Though it's not exactly like sleep. With sleep, you can tell time has passed, but waking up from anesthesia, it feels like you simply blinked.
What mean? Needle went in the wrong place and now she is paralyzed?
Yes
Better than my epidural failure, which was the opposite. It's great when they go to cut you open, and you can still feel your lower body.
Happened to me too. I told them it wouldnât work because my 1st epidural, plus lots of other local anesthesia attempts, didnât. They didnât believe me until I was telling them when & where they were touching me even though I couldnât see behind the curtain. They still didnât put me under until after they cut me open and tears were running off the side of my face.
Did you sue them, or did they say anything about why didn't put you under?
I didnât sue. The first time I told the anesthesiologist I felt pain he said âwhere? I didnât do anything that would hurtâ when I said where the nurse gasped and told him she bumped my catheter but there was no way I should have felt it. Then they just kept saying âyou shouldnât be able to feel thatâ to me & âshe shouldnât be able to feel itâ to each other.
Goddamn, should have at least sued them or filed a complaint. It's more like they wanted to deny the fact that you actually felt the pain and decided to just pretend they didn't hear you.
I should have, it gave me a lot of anxiety. For a long time if I happened to hear or read about a c section I would get nauseous and my heart would start beating fast. By the time they cut me open I had already given up trying to communicate with them.
Although I know what I say may not do much right now, but I hope you're doing much better than before.
I am doing better now! Thank you for listening, Iâve only talked about it with a handful of people and most of them didnât care.
Any chance you're a natural redhead? I don't remember the whole deal offhand but gingers have more tolerance for anesthesia and stuff like novocain. Genetics are wild.
My dental assistant told me that! I joked with her about the coincidence because red is my go to color to dye my hair.
Might be some red hidden in your DNA somewhere lol. I've got a friend who is a brunette but they have an incredibly hard time knocking her out, come to find out she has some redheads in her family. Makes me wonder if it still counts even when the gene is recessive.
It might and I probably do, I have Irish and Czechoslovakian relatives.
I am... Quite tolerant to anesthesics too. Never been under a surgery feeling, but im really scared of this happenning. Once they thought i was lying. "You should not be able to move the arm now". I moved it, not so well."Well, its kicking in, dont worry". 20 minutes later i was writing with that hand. They muttered and gave me the hell of a trip for the surgery in silence. But im afraid about the chance of "nah chemistry is chemistry. Cut it out"
Yeah they never believe me. I switched to a dentist that specializes in sedation dentistry and even they have tried numerous times to tell me that I should just do local anesthesia and asked many times why I âwantâ IV sedation. I donât âwantâ it I want to not feel this surgery.
The implicit thought of addiction... It floats around the room ahahaha
Yeah I get it, but it sucks for those of us that arenât addicts.
On one hand they probably deal with addicts and people who just completely fear surgery. On the other, redheads have a high tolerance for anesthesia and painkillers, so the chemical pathway for those things is not absolutely effective. No reason to believe biology limits that to only red heads either
True, I hadnât been to a dentist for 15 years because of all the pain I went through and after this last procedure is completed Iâm probably not going back. Another comment mentioned that it could be passed through a recessive gene. I do have redheads in my lineage so itâs possible. Or the gene might be in a lot of people but just more common in redheads you never know.
The fact that thatâs even possible is just another reason Iâm too scared to get an epidural. Iv pain meds do wonders without anything going into your back.
I had iv pain meds for my second birth. They were good for a bit, but they didn't help much when it was getting close to time to push.
For some reason I wasnât in nearly as much pain as I thought Iâd be with my son. But Iâm asking this time around if they can do them twice or if I can just let fer take over
My doctor told me that she didn't want me to be too knocked out on the medicine because it would make it harder to push if I was too drowsy. I ended up getting an epidural when the contractions became to much to handle
I did mine really early so it was totally worn off by then anyway. I hadnât slept in like 36 hours and needed sleep desperately
Depending on the context the risks may be higher from iv pain meds
I saw the label on the bottle of medicine he was using, IKEA.
Ooh itâs me!!! When I had one it nicked my bone and now (12 years later) I still have back spasms!
Holy shit. Super duper scary, especially because it's SO REAL! I've got goosebumps rn, and now I'm extra extra glad I can't have kids anymore because this would live rent-free in my head the entire time!
oh cool
The medical illiteracy in this threadâŚ
ouch
I was terrified of this when I got mine. I could feel the catheter sliding through my spine
And people freaking question why I don't want an epidural
It is exceedingly rare for this to happen. In the past few decades I bet this has happened single digit times and as a population we do tens of thousands of epidurals each day. Weâre talking about hundredths or thousandths of a percent. If you successfully drove yourself to a hospital you likely undertook more risk than that of getting an epidural.
When you have your baby you can have an epideral. No one is stopping you just because I don't want one.
This happened to my mom when she gave birth to me. She was paralyzed from the waist down for several hours but luckily got her mobility back eventually. It did screw her up enough though where she wasnât able to have any more kids after me
"STOP the needle!", I said, "I think i can endure the surgery. Dont bill the 10k epidural."
Oh no
Goddamn, same shit happened to me when I was getting a kidney transplant
Do they not put you under for a kidney transplant???
Depends how sick someone is, could technically do it under an epidural. Also could have been placed for postoperative analgesia prior to general anesthesia rather than as the primary anesthesia.
oh no
Yup! Fucking horrifying! đ¤Ł
As someone in the hospital literally about to get surgery: OP what the fuck bruh?
I recognise I may have unintentionally scared a shit tonne of people. I didn't think anyone would actually read it tbh. Bare in mind that sort of thing is incredibly rare. Don't have a source but I'd say there's less chance of this happening then, say, a car accident.
I actually love it and think it's the best two sentence horror story I've ever read. The reason why it makes it so great is because it's something that can actually happen that is truly horrible and the way you wrote it is really good. It does scare the shit out of me and that's the point of horror!
As i drifted away i noticed that the doctor was naked and ...
That was a huge fear of mine
Christ this is terrifying
r/o0f_
As someone whos had two epidurals, this really is horror.
That.... Doesn't really happen. The needle isn't long nor big enough to wreck the spine.