http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/jun/09/family-seeks-answers-after-womans-lap-band-death/
Family seeks answers after woman's Lap-Band death
By Sandra Dibble
8:14 p.m., June 9, 2011
Cheronna Marie Williams / photo courtesy of Williams' family
TIJUANA — Cheronna Marie Williams, who worried about her weight for years, thought she had finally found a solution. Together with a friend, she headed to Tijuana for stomach-banding surgery, a procedure that normally takes less than an hour.
Williams, a 33-year-old from Chula Vista, did not survive the May 26 surgery.
This week, Williams’ family filed a complaint with the Baja CaliforniaAttorney General’s Office against Dr. Pedro Kuri, a Tijuana physician with years of experience in Lap-Bandsurgery who operates at a top private hospital. The office has launched an investigation.
“I have never been explained what really happened to my daughter and why,” her mother, Phyllis Ackerman-Gainer, said from her home in the Eastlake community. Gainer said even though Kuri has delivered the news by phone and in person in Tijuana, she still wonders about the cause of death and how it could have happened.
Williams’ death comes as Mexico is preparing a major campaign to promote medical tourism amongU.S. and Canadian patients in search of lower-cost medical care. Baja California’s tourism secretariat said medical tourism generated about $89 million in revenue for the state last year as an estimated 455,000 foreigners came for a broad range of procedures, from bariatric surgery to dental work to LASIK eye surgery.
Both the Mexican government and medical leaders have been trying to ensure a consistent, high-quality standard of care. Across Mexico, nine hospitals are now certified by Joint Commission International, a branch of the U.S. nonprofit Joint Commission that accredits and certifies medical facilities and services.
Authorities in Baja California said they also are working to bolster patient’s rights by giving more visiblity to the state’s 15-year-old Medical Arbibration Commission, which takes up the cases of dissatisfied patients and negotiates solutions with doctors.
At a Thursday conference in Tijuana, Yolanda Revetti, a 69-year-old cosmetologist from Escondido, praised the commission for fighting on her behalf after a dental procedure went awry. The commission arranged for another dentist to fix the damage.
“Thanks to them, I am smiling again,” Revetti said.
Several thousand U.S. patients — an exact number is not available — come to Baja California for stomach-banding surgery each year, according to health experts there. Kuri alone performed the Lap-Band procedure 900 times in 2010, according to state health officials.
Lap-Band and similar procedures involve placing an adjustable device around the top portion of the stomach during laparoscopic surgery.
Mexico’s death rate for stomach-banding surgery could not be obtained. The figure for the United States is about one in every 1,000 cases, according to the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery and research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Alan Wittgrove, head of the Wittgrove Bariatric Center in La Jolla and director of metabolic surgery at UCSD Medical Center, said “What patients need to do is their homework, and go to a place that has the right facilities, the properly trained doctors.”
But ultimately, he added, ““Even good surgeons can have complications. There’s no question about that.”
Kuri has not responded to telephone requests for comment about Williams. The death certificate lists the causes as hypovolemic shock, critical hemorrhaging and severe lactic acidosis, suggesting that Williams’ heart stop beating after she lost a lot of blood.
“He said, ‘There was so much blood, just so much blood,” said Jennifer Wechlo, the friend who went with Williams and heard about the fatality from Kuri while recovering from her own Lap-Band procedure. “He said that as she was waking up in (the intensive-care unit), she had cardiac arrest. He seemed very distraught.”
Williams, a single mother of an 8-year-old girl, was readying to marry her boyfriend.
“He adored (Williams) the way she was,” Gainer said, but he agreed to pay for the $6,500 operation — far less than what she would have paid in the U.S.
Williams decided to have weight-loss surgery after Wechlo decided likewise. “Everybody kept saying, why would you go to Mexico?” Wechlo recalled. “I kept telling everyone that it was just fine, and then it wasn’t.”
Mexican health authorities said Kuri and the hospital where he performed the surgery had the proper licenses and followed the right protocols.
“They had all the equipment necessary for an operation. We went over the measures that the doctor took and they were all correct,” said Ricardo Zammarón, who oversees licensing of medical facilities in Baja California.
On his website, Kuri lists ample experience: board-certified surgeon in Mexico since 1976, a former chief of surgery at General Hospital in Tijuana, a member of the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery.
He operated on Williams at Hospital Angeles, a modern facility located in Tijuana’s upscale Río Zone. Representatives for the hospital did not return phone calls asking about the case.
Such a sad story. I feel for her family and friends- I don't know what the comparison would be for US to Mexico complications but I had my band placed in the us and ended up with a serious complication. my surgeon is a pioneer in the surgery and he and his surgical partners run a center of excellence. There just are no guarantees.
ReplyDeleteA very sad story. Wow.
ReplyDeleteI think that having surgery carries a risk, no matter where one has it-- I know that I was much more afraid that I'd die from surgery than that the surgery wouldn't work. But there is a risk reward ratio as well... and that is why I took the chance, in order to improve my health.