Emmalyn Nguyen plastic surgery botched. Denver, Colorado teen girl left permanently brain damaged and in coma as family file suit. The rise of cosmetic surgery.
A Denver, Colorado teen has suffered irreversible brain damage after going into cardiac arrest as she was about to go under the knife for breast implant surgery – with the girl’s family now blaming Greenwood Village doctors for what they described as a ‘botched procedure’.
Dr. Geoffrey Kim and nurse anesthetist Rex Meeker are accused of failing to call 911 for nearly 5½ hours after Emmalyn Nguyen’s heart stopped on Aug. 1. The teen never even made it into surgery CBS Denver local reports.
‘They leave her on the operating table for 5½ hours and don’t call 911 for 5½ hours while Emmalyn’s mother sits in the waiting room unaware of what’s happening,’ the Nguyens’ lawyer, David Woodruff, told KDVR.
How safe are breast augmentation procedures?
After graduating high school, Nguyen decided to get a breast augmentation at Colorado Aesthetics & Plastic Surgery to improve her image according to the girl’s family.
She was being prepped for the 2 p.m. surgery when she went into cardiac arrest — and was found unconscious 15 minutes later, Woodruff said.
Staffers used CPR to try to revive the teen but she never fully regained consciousness. Meeker finally called 911 more than five hours after Nguyen was first given anesthesia, the family’s lawsuit said.
‘What should have been a very standard procedure turned into a nightmare for her and her family,’ Woodruff said.
Nguyen’s parents are now suing Kim and Meeker, alleging gross negligence.
The girl’s mother, Lynn Fam, said she was told during the $6,000 procedure that no complications had occurred.
‘He said ‘’Everything is fine, Emmalyn is fine, everything is good,’’ Fam told KCNC, recalling what Kim told her. “She’s young, she’s healthy, she’ll be OK, it’s just taking her long to wake up.”
Why did it take 51/2 hours to call emergency? A tragedy that could’ve been avoided?
Nguyen was taken to a hospital before being transferred 22 days later to a rehab center, where she still receives continual care in a ‘minimally conscious state’ and is unable to speak, walk or eat on her own. She suffered brain damage and is unlikely to return to her previous condition, the lawsuit said.
‘She will remain in a nursing home essentially non-functional with someone feeding her through a tube for the next 50 years,’ Woodruff told KDVR.
An attorney for Kim declined to comment on the suit, saying the physician is ‘not at liberty’ to speak about any specific patient.
An attorney representing Meeker, meanwhile, said he provided ‘reasonable and within the standard of care’ during the procedure.
‘We are confident that the facts will bear this out,’ attorney Douglas Wolaske said in a statement.
More women going under the knife to maintain image:
Over 300,000 breast augmentations are performed in the USA every year as women of all ages continue to be preoccupied with their looks and ‘image.’
Data released by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) shows there were nearly a quarter million more cosmetic procedures performed in 2018 than the previous year. According to ASPS, there were more than 17.7 million surgical and minimally-invasive cosmetic procedures performed in the United States in 2018, a number that has risen steadily over the past five years – which sees no signs of abating.
Of the more than 1.8 million cosmetic surgical procedures performed in 2018, the top 5 were:
- Breast augmentation (313,735 procedures, up 4 percent from 2017)
- Liposuction (258,558 procedures, up 5 percent from 2017)
- Nose reshaping (213,780 procedures, down 2 percent from 2017)
- Eyelid surgery (206,529 procedures, down 1 percent from 2017)
- Tummy tuck (130,081 procedures, about the same as 2017)
