Oregon teen dies of sepsis after doctors fail to clean wound before stitching, lawsuit says

My husband had sepsis from a bacterial lung infection. We thought he had a cold. Maybe the flu. 24 hours later he couldn’t talk straight or take a full breath and there was an ambulance at the house. This case is egregious, and if the details of the suit are true, I hope the family gets everything they’re asking for.

Not to be pedantic but a hyper inflammatory response is the definition of sepsis so it can happen in older individuals as well

Poor kid seemed like he really suffered before passing.

I can understand that even the greatest doctors might miss something at times, and so long as the overall care has been to the best of their ability I wouldn't call it negligent. Medicine is really hard and urgent care is understaffed basically everywhere. It's a tough job, so thank you for your work first of all. But this case baffles me 😭 They removed a dozen pieces of moss and pine, so how was that missed. Beyond that, the nurse who told them not to go to urgent care when he started getting worse? Every doctor I've ever had has told me very clearly that even if it's in the first night I'm taking antibiotics, if I get ANY worse, I need to get myself to urgent care to get checked, because chances are it's a worse infection than initially thought and infections can get really bad, really fast if you're not on top of them. Poor kid.

thanks for double checking. i too am a chronic double checker. sorry for dumping another 25 pts on you today

The article mentioned a quote that 'pine needles and debris' don't show up on x-ray, so they only attempted to flush it (a deep stab wound) with saline.

I like how you slipped the word "intentionally" into there. Really gives it some punch.

Could be any number of reasons, doctors are still just people. Maybe they were lazy, maybe they were annoyed they were interrupted from something, maybe they're distracted because they've got something in their personal life going on, maybe they're dumb, maybe they're spacing out because they've been working for 20+ hours straight and have only eaten junk food and coffee, maybe they thought someone else had taken care of the cleaning and they were just coming in to stitch him up. Hospitals have a lot of issues, and it's kind of shocking this kind of thing doesn't happen every day, honestly.

Sometimes they’re just f****** lazy. Almost lost my grandma to renal failure because they just kept telling her she had the flu. Drug her near dead ass into the ER and caused a scene I’m not really proud of. Dad kept getting told he had strep throat without looking in his throat. Turns out there was a 6x4 inch infected polyp in there. Not even far down, he opened his mouth and the damn thing looked right at you.

As a child, I cut my knee open on the sprinkler head. My flesh had already bruised and had a lot of discoloration because of how the abrasion happened. I ended up cutting it open again, a half a year later, and the surgeons from the second time, found debris and grass in my knee. Everybody agreed that it would’ve been hard to see.

Deal with the ER enough times and you WILL wind up with some kind of negligence story. I wound up there with all the signs of serotonin syndrome and hitting me f****** fast. 4 hour wait even though they had my vitals and saw my heart rate and blood pressure were in the “dear god get to a hospital immediately” range. I could barely talk or walk the shaking and tremors were so bad. Doctor didn’t even ask me anything, he just came in and handed me a prescription for nausea meds for some f****** season and sent me home. Luckily it subsided on its own but it felt great that the best the ER could do was wait half a day and tell me to try really hard not to die as they kicked me out. Then my ex had a 3 year long saga going to the ER repeatedly for debilitating abdominal pain. Not like cramping pain, but being stabbed with a knife and she couldn’t walk pain. Every time the ER just told her she was pregnant, when she was single and that was impossible (this had been going on for a while before we got to together). They’d make her do a pregnancy test anyway, it would come back negative, and they’d just shrug and say they didn’t know but she should rest and take Tylenol but nothing stronger because maybe, just maybe she was pregnant and just a false negative. Like 7 or 8 ER trips, a few different primary doctors, and countless miserable days and nights over 3 years to finally get someone to check her for endo and shocker, the thing she kept insisting was the problem was actually the problem. And finally with my daughter. She’s tube fed with a g tube in her stomach. Maybe about a year after it was put in it popped out, which we were told by the surgeon to put a catheter in the hole to keep it open and go to the ER so we did that. They put a new one in, no big deal right? Except that doctor didn’t know how to do it. The next day the new one came out, except we had no idea for how long. She never acted like anything was wrong so it could have been hours and we couldn’t get the spare catheter in. We were told explicitly that the hole can close in 15 minutes and need surgery to reopen so we were already panicked. The ER didn’t think the baby with an open hole to her stomach that needed attended to right away to prevent surgery was a big deal, so we waited a few more hours. When we finally saw a doctor it took everything he had to get a new button in and save her from a surgery. So how did the first doctor screw up? There’s a balloon on the inside filled with water that holds the button (the part that’s attached to her) to the inside of her stomach and keeps it from popping out. You have to keep pressure on the plunger syringe as you disconnect it from the button otherwise all the water will be squeezed out of the balloon back into the syringe. He didn’t realize that, so she went home with nothing preventing it from just falling out. When we found it it was totally deflated, but when I tested it after all the drama was over there was no leak or problems with it. The only way that couldn’t happened is if he didn’t hold the plunger and no water actually stayed in it. Nowadays we change the buttons out at home so no ER needed, but it takes a while to get used to the idea of removing and placing a tube in your child’s stomach which we were not capable of back then when it was more new.

WTF is it with Willamette Valley hospitals? Eugene doesn't even have one anymore. 

Are you saying that a hospital is completely profit driven?!? Here, in America? That's something that only happens in under developed minds! Oops I meant undeveloped countries.

I've read the article like 3 times cause I had a similar injury to my hand, similar series of events (I was told twice, 2 days in a row in person by a nurse that I was fine) until day 3 my hand was the size of a football, spent 2 weeks on IV antibiotics in the hospital, with 3 surgeries to save it. final surgery involved (gore explanation warning) peeling the skin and all the muscle away from the bones to scrape the infection off, it worked thankfully.

ER doctor here. What? It takes a minimum of 11 years and board certification to become an ER doctor...just like every other doctor.

Agreed, 9 out of 10 times it's probably nothing, but that one time could be a life on the line... I remember going to the ER and finding out I had a serious infection and although my fever and symptoms had gone down after antibiotics, they were still worried about sepsis and offered to keep me under observation until the tests came back. Good medical professionals should want to make sure their patients recover, not flip their beds or tell them to not worry when there's a concern.

I think the article said the mom called the ER back, and spoke with a nurse. So wasn’t technically your traditional phone triage nurse. She was merely likely talking to whatever nurse/charge picked up the phone and gave her the advice on vibes. But I agree, this part of the article made me sad, as someone who would regularly take these kinds of calls when I was charge. I would almost always say, “unfortunately we can’t give medical advice over the phone but if you’re concerned in anyway about new or worsening symptoms, don’t be afraid to come back.” And I probably would’ve nudge nudged that mom to bring him back if he was still having fevers and worsening pain/redness while on oral antibiotics.

I can understand that. I felt they should have looked at it and my body a little more. They really only relied on the scans and even missed a couple of broken ribs. It was not a small rural hospital. I just expected a little better from level 1 trauma center. At the end of the day, I didn't die from it, so the care was adequate.

NDAs don't matter.  What's already being reported in the news would be enough for an investigation and then if true I would expect some sort of disciplinary action (albeit probably not license revocation unless there is a pattern of malpractice).

So, like cops? 

The thin white line protects its own.

Isn’t that wide debridement something they should’ve sent him up to the OR for in the first place? This isn’t a clean knife wound. Of course there will be debris. Doubtful you can get it all out. If they stitched it shut, where did they expect that debris to go? Not like it was left open so it could work itself out or something.

… you’ll always see air in soft tissues after a stab wound.

Have you ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect?

Hey now a vet, would do a much better job…. they’re much better at flushing nasty wounds, and knowing when to leave a drain in. Wonder if the doc was a newbie or some old hat that brushed everything off?

And yet, the Doctor seems unfamiliar with germ theory.

Damn that’s so fucked up that it’s both too :(