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Article: Case Study: Facing Up To Mistakes; An injured patient and her doctor help to create change at Brigham and Women's.
- Article from:
- Newsweek
- Article date:
- October 16, 2006
- Author:
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Byline: Claudia Kalb
Linda Kenney is an advocate for change. Born with club feet, Kenney was a hospital veteran, enduring 19 surgeries before she was admitted to Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital in November 1999. Kenney assumed her ankle-replacement surgery that day would be uneventful; instead, a nerve block injected by anesthesiologist Dr. Rick van Pelt went straight to her heart, sending Kenney, then 37, into full-blown cardiac arrest. She was saved by open-heart surgery.
From the minute she regained consciousness in the ICU, Kenney, who is married and has three children, wanted to know what went wrong. A nurse told her she'd probably had an ...