Smuggling Racket Uncovered As Doctors Found Smuggling Towels Inside Patients
Saturday, January 27th, 2007
“She always said, ‘On the left side it feels like there’s something there. It felt like something moved,’ ” Valle’s daughter, Jeanne Clark, said in 2004.
Bonnie Valle had surgery for emphysema at the Cleveland Clinic in 1995 and died at age 60 in 2002. Her body was donated to research at the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine in Rootstown. However, a dissection revealed a green surgical cloth the size of a large hand towel had been left in her left lung.
Her family sued in 2004 for alleging she suffered serious complications and died as a result.
The Cleveland Clinic settled in the suit filed, but Jeffrey Miller, Valle’s Canton-based doctor, insists “She lived seven years … which is certainly as well as one would have expected her to survive given her severe emphysema and poor pulmonary function and overall condition,” (Jeff, dude, she had a god damned towel in her lung. Let me see you try living seven years whilst people try to dry themselves off on your chest. Ass).
Source: Guardian