CBS4An 18-year-old girl has been left with brain damage after her cosmetic surgery went horrendously wrong. Now, the family has filed a lawsuit against the medical professionals who were supposed to be overseeing her care.
After saving up $6,000 for the procedure, Emmalyn Nguyen decided to have breast augmentation surgery, performed by Greenwood Village doctor Geoffrey Kim in his Colorado Aesthetics and Plastic Surgery office.
‘I was fine with it. We didn’t think anything like that was going to happen to our daughter. I was a teenage girl once before,’ her mum, Lynn Fam, said. However, the surgery did not go according to plan.
CBS4According to the lawsuit, Emmalyn was left unobserved and unattended after nurse Rex Meeker gave her anaesthesia at 14:00 on August 1 this year.
The procedure was only supposed to take two hours, but as it stretched into the afternoon, Fam started to have ‘kind of a weird feeling’, she told CBS4.
As the mum grew more concerned, Dr Kim even stepped in to allay any worries, telling her:
Everything went fine, the only thing is we didn’t proceed with the procedure because her heart rate dropped but she is fine. He said everything is fine, Emmalyn is fine, everything is good. She’s young, she’s healthy, she’ll be okay, it’s just taking her long to wake up.
CBS4The reality was much starker. During the time-frame of the procedure, Emmalyn is reported to have suffered cardiac arrest, was then revived, and went into cardiac arrest again. Despite the fact she was ‘neurologically unresponsive’, 911 wasn’t called for more than five hours.
Meeker eventually called and when the ambulance arrived, the teen was taken to Littleton Adventist Hospital – 22 days later, she was transferred to a rehabilitation hospital to recover.
Emmalyn is now in a ‘minimally conscious state’ likely for the rest of her life – unable to speak, walk, eat or take care of herself. The lawsuit, alleging negligence, won’t bring the teen back – but the mum says it may provide some answers.
CBS4Fam explained:
To me it’s a miracle she pulled through all that and she is still fighting this. I don’t know how they can sleep at night knowing they did this to her. They ruined Emmalyn’s life, not just hers but all of ours.
Meeker has been involved in a lawsuit previously: in 2007, after Paula Harty, of Silverthorne, suffered severe brain damage in a breast augmentation surgery, the nurse was accused of negligence and failing to properly administer anaesthesia and monitor her condition. A month later, Harty passed away.
Their lawyer, David Woodruff, called the delay in calling emergency services ‘unbelievable’ and ‘unconscionable’. While it’s not easy, Fam says they all try to stay strong, ‘in case she can hear us’.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.