Hey, Doc, where’s my thumb?
Bumbling medical staff at Brooklyn’s Kings County Hospital accidentally lost part of a patient’s severed thumb, leaving him with a stub where a fully reconstructed digit could have been, the patient says.
“It was surreal,” said Raymond Henderson, 60, who plans to sue the city for $5 million.
The Vietnam vet’s nightmare began after a steel door came crashing down on his hand as he helped clear out the basement of a bodega in Bedford-Stuyvesant on July 10.
Henderson ran to a volunteer ambulance base a block away on Greene Ave. where medics removed his glove, put the thumb into an ice container, and rushed him to the city-run hospital.
Inside, Henderson was relieved when the emergency room doctor said he’d be able to reattach the precious appendage after taking an X-ray of the injury.
But when the longtime Brooklyn resident returned to his hospital room, the thumb was missing.
“I started to panic,” recalled Henderson, who founded a nonprofit to bring attention to the Buffalo soldiers, the storied African-American soldiers in the Old West.
At the hospital, frantic medical staff spent a half-hour searching for the thumb, Henderson said.
“They were looking under the table and asking the orderlies and everybody. Nobody knew where it was,” Henderson said.
The exasperated doctor had no choice but to stitch up the thumb without the tip.
“The only thing they could do was to cut the bone and tissue back and sew it up,” said Henderson.
On Tuesday, his lawyer, Harley Fastman, plans to file a notice of claim indicating his intention to sue the city.
“The hospital has a responsibility to the community and its patients and in this case that responsibility was breached and as a result my client has a permanent deformity,” said Fastman.
Health and Hospitals Corp. spokesman Ian Michaels responded: “Kings County Hospital strives to serve all its patients well. We cannot, however, comment on an individual patient because of patient confidentiality laws.”
The hospital has a troubled track record, ranking as the city Health and Hospital Corp.’s facility with the most claims filed against it for four of the five most recent fiscal years, according to city Controller Scott Stringer’s ClaimStat report.
During the 2013 fiscal year, the city paid out $24 million in settlements and judgments stemming from medical malpractice cases against the hospital, far exceeding the No. 2 hospital on the list, Jacobi Medical Center, at $17.5 million.
