[Solved]: The patient underwent a day-surgery procedure…

The patient underwent a day-surgery procedure involving esophagoscopy and bronchoscopy during which the physician removed mucus from her lungs. During her three-hour post-operative stay at the hospital, the patient received 30 mg of morphine, 25 mg of Valium, 4 mg of Zofran, 2 mg of Dilaudid, 5 mg of Versed, 50 mcg of Fentanyl, and, just prior to discharge, 12.5 mg of promethazine. At the time of her discharge, several of the nursing staff voiced that the patient was drowsy, unable to under-stand discharge instructions, and was acting “drunk and incoherent.” The next day the patient was discovered dead in her bed at 4:00 A.M. The family filed a wrongful death law-suit, naming the nurses as failing to meet the standard of care in allowing a pharmaceutically inebriated same-day surgery patient to be discharged rather than seeing that she was admitted for overnight observation. The family’s medical toxicologist testified that patients in general have a better chance of survival in the hospital as opposed to being discharged home. He could not, though, testify that this patient would have survived had she been hospitalized as opposed to being discharged a few hours after surgery.