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Bell v. Mt Sinai Med. Ctr.6/13/1994
HARPER, Presiding Judge.
Plaintiff-appellant, James A. Bell, Administrator of the Estate of Vivian Bell, instituted this wrongful death action in the Court of Common Pleas of Cuyahoga County on March 31, 1989. Mt. Sinai Medical Center ("Mt. Sinai"), Thomas Santoscoy, M.D., and Terry King, M.D., were named as defendants. Appellant alleged that Drs. Santoscoy and King performed negligently during Mrs. Bell's coronary bypass surgery at Mt. Sinai, and thereby proximately caused her death.
The case proceeded to trial on March 5, 1991, and the jury began deliberations on March 14, 1991. On March 19, 1991, the jury found in favor of Drs. Santoscoy and King, but was unable to enter a verdict with regard to Mt. Sinai's liability. The trial court, therefore, entered verdicts in favor of the physicians based upon interrogatory answers, and ordered a new trial on appellant's claims against Mt. Sinai.
Appellant filed a motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict or in the alternative for new trial. The trial court overruled the motion on May 9, 1991.
Appellant filed a notice of appeal in this court on May 23, 1991 from the verdicts rendered in favor of defendants-appellees, Drs. Santoscoy and King. We dismissed the appeal pursuant to Civ.R. 54(B) on July 19, 1991.
The new trial on appellant's claims against Mt. Sinai commenced on November 18, 1991. The jury rendered a verdict in favor of appellant and against Mt. Sinai in the amount of $3,078,000 on November 27, 1991. The trial court denied Mt. Sinai's motions for new trial and/or a remittitur on February 20, 1992.
Mt. Sinai appealed from the verdict rendered against it on March 10, 1992. Appellant filed a second notice of appeal from the verdicts rendered in favor of Drs. King and Santoscoy on March 18, 1992, the present appeal.
Mrs. Bell, on September 28, 1987, underwent coronary artery bypass graft ("CABG") surgery at Mt. Sinai. She was sixty-nine years old. Mrs. Bell's attending physician and surgeon was Dr. Santoscoy, a board-certified cardiothoracic surgeon. Dr. Santoscoy routinely had a resident in the operating room at Mt. Sinai during the performance of heart surgery. Dr. Scott Comp, a fifth year general surgery resident, assisted in Mrs. Bell's surgery.
Dr. Comp initiated the surgery by performing a median sternotomy, the operative procedure to open the chest. Residents at Mt. Sinai routinely performed this procedure. After Dr. Comp opened the skin down to the sternum, he used an electric Bovie cauterization device to divide the sternal ligament which lies under the sternum. Dr. Comp burned a hole in Mrs. Bell's innominate artery while performing the procedure. The innominate artery provides blood to the brain, head, neck and face.
Dr. Santoscoy testified that he was trained to use electric cautery to divide the sternal ligament during the sternotomy. Moreover, Dr. John Kratz, an expert witness for Dr. Santoscoy who is a cardiac surgeon at the Medical University of South Carolina, testified that he trains residents to divide the sternal ligament with electric cautery. He testified further that 99.9 percent of all heart surgeons conceive the use of the electric cautery as the proper way to divide the ligament.
According to Dr. Comp and Dr. Santoscoy, the Bovie cautery was correctly placed at the sternal notch during Mrs. Bell's surgery. However, only minutes into the surgery, significant bleeding developed, arising from the sternal notch. Drs. Santoscoy and Comp first applied digital compression in order to find the source of the bleeding in an area above the suprasternal notch. Dr. Santo
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