Anesthetist convicted of manslaughter dies during weight-loss surgery. The trial of the Viterbo local health authority doctor brought to trial by the family of a forty-year-old who died under the knife on 19 April 2017 ended yesterday in the early afternoon. The woman’s parents, who did not miss a hearing assisted by the plaintiff’s lawyer Marco Russo, supported the medical error from the first moment. Judge Daniela Rispoli yesterday sentenced the anesthetist from Viterbo to 4 months in prison (suspended sentence and no mention) and to the payment of an executive provision of 150 thousand euros (jointly and severally with the ASL) for the two civil parties. The damage will instead be quantified in civil court. Prosecutor Paola Conti, during the discussion, had asked for a sentence of one and a half years.
The victim, suffering from a serious form of obesity, had arrived specifically from Rome to undergo surgery in the excellence department of the Viterbo hospital. The tragedy occurred on 19 April 2017 in Belcolle. When between 12 and 2pm something went wrong. During the hearings, doctors and nurses who found themselves, in various capacities, in the operating block room of the Belcolle hospital where the patient died were the ones who told what this was.
The drama began with three unsuccessful attempts to intubate the patient, a forty-year-old Roman woman suffering from a serious form of obesity, carried out by the accused for about twenty minutes starting from midday. Given the impossibility of completing the operation, the anesthetist decided to wake up the patient, postponing the operation, which in any case was not urgent. However, instead of waking up, the woman would have had pulmonary edema and she would have died. This was explained during the previous hearing by another anesthetist, connected via video conference, who would have intervened in the operating room that very day. «They had tried to intubate her three times, without results, but when I arrived the situation had normalized and shortly after I returned to my operating room where another operation was underway. But when I looked again there was chaos. And I called the director who was in charge of the unit.” The head of anesthesia and resuscitation would also arrive around 12.50. There would have been a crowd of medical workers around the patient. The only solution is tracheotomy. At 1.46pm the ear doctor would take over, perfecting the tracheotomy, taking 9 minutes to complete the operation. But by then it was too late and the patient had died.
The deputy prosecutor Paola Conti retraced all the steps of the trial during the discussion. «The woman – she stated – did not die from the risk factors linked to her pathology but from cerebral apoxia». Cerebral apoxia, or the condition of reduced oxygenation of the brain cells, due to the various attempts to intubate her which sent her into cardiac arrest.
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