A horrific “comedy of errors” at a Manhattan hospital doomed a hard-working Harlem mom who went in for a routine gastric bypass but was left in agony and ultimately died after two botched surgeries, a new malpractice lawsuit claims.
“You’re not ‘House,’ and you don’t know anything!” Chrarlette Mayfield claimed a gruff St. Luke’s Roosevelt hospital employee snapped at her last April, making reference to the TV doctor, as the desperate daughter tried to get help for her mom, Lavoris Mayfield, 44, as she coughed up blood and moaned from stomach pain after the first procedure.
“They just blew me off,” said Charlette, 29, who field suit yesterday against St. Luke’s and three surgeons in Manhattan Supreme Court for unspecified monetary damages.
The family’s lawyer, Marc Albert, said Lavoris was killed by an inadvertent cut a surgeon made during Mayfield’s first surgery — which the suit claims was missed, and then missed again during a second surgery.
“This, essentially, was a comedy of errors from the get-go . . . It’s almost incredible that you can do so many things wrong consecutively with regard to treating a patient,” Albert said.
Lavoris left behind two other daughters: Crystal Gaines, 19, who has a chromosomal disorder that affects her mental development, and Felicia Gaines, 17. Charlette now cares for both of her younger sisters, along with her own two kids.
Several years before she died, Lavoris had received a commercial driver’s license and was driving trucks, sometimes cross-country, to raise money to buy the family a home in Philadelphia.
She entered St. Luke’s April 2, 2012, to undergo gastric bypass, which her primary physician had recommended for her to lose weight, Charlette said. Lavoris underwent a series of pre-surgery screenings that cleared her for that surgery, the suit says.
But once he started operating a surgeon found a tumor, causing him to halt the planned bypass, and remove the tumor, Albert said. The tumor later was found to be benign.
The next day, Charlette said, Lavoris “was in so much pain. She could talk just a little bit . . . she was spitting up clogs of blood.”
On April 4, after suspecting that Lavoris’ “problems were being caused by a hernia which required repair,” they did a second surgery, to fix that umbilical hernia, Albert said.
She was “closed up and felt to be fine by” doctors, Albert said. “In actuality, things were already in a downward spiral, and in coming days, she developed tachycardia, sepsis and multiple organ failure.”
Lavoris died April 12. An autopsy, which found she died from “multiple complications” from the tumor being removed during her first surgery, noted the “perforation” made by the surgeon when he took out that tumor, Albert said.
“It should have been seen right away and dealt with,” said Albert of that accidental cut.
Jim Mandler, a spokesman for St. Luke’s, and Teixeira both declined to comment.