A Brooklyn woman who fled Soviet persecution to seek a better life in the United States suffered a horrific, blood-spattered death after New York-Presbyterian doctors dithered for hours over how to treat her, a scathing lawsuit claims.
“They just killed her,” said Semyon Geykhman, husband of the tragic woman, Klara Geykhman. “She suffered about three hours. She was all in blood. She died terrible.”
The family’s lawyer, Marius Wesser, said, “This is pretty egregious. In my mind, a top hospital, something like that should never have happened.”
The Brooklyn Supreme Court lawsuit says New York-Presbyterian doctors and staff acted negligently after performing a routine angiogram on Geykhman, 56, on Jan. 26, 2007.
The mother of three “started having dizziness, and a drop in blood pressure and heart rate” after staffers removed a sheath that had held a catheter, Wesser said.
It later was found the sheath’s removal ruptured “one of the blood vessels in her lower abdomen” — a known possible complication — Wesser said.
But when doctors began to “treat those symptoms, they thought it was something else,” Wesser said. “She proceeds to bleed to death over 3½ hours.”
Wesser’s own expert has found that if doctors acted promptly and ordered a CT scan on the former home health aide, they could have identified the hemorrhage and quickly repaired it.