A jury has awarded $500,000 to a man who recorded his surgery only to learn that a doctor working on him spent the time making offensive comments as he was under anesthesia.
The unidentified patient, who is from Vienna, Virginia, was having a colonoscopy in April 2013 and pressed record on his smartphone beforehand.
He wanted to be sure he didn't miss any of his doctor's instructions following the procedure - when he may still be groggy from the anesthesia - in case they pertained to his aftercare.
But when he listened back to the recording, he heard the anesthesiologist saying she wanted to punch him and accuse him of having a sexually transmitted disease while he was under sedation.
One of the jurors, Farid Khairzada, told the Washington Post that 'there was not much defense, because everything was on tape'.
The anesthesiologist, Tiffany Ingham, 42, is heard to say to the sedated patient:
'After five minutes of talking to you in pre-op, I wanted to punch you in the face and man you up a little bit.'Then when a female assistant points out a rash on the man's body, Ingham says if she touched it she might get
'some syphilis on your arm or something'.
She later says of the rash:
'It?s probably tuberculosis in the penis, so you?ll be all right.'Ingham also mocked the man when it was noted that he got queasy seeing a needle go into this arm, saying;
'Well, why are you looking then, retard?'And she said:
'I?m going to mark hemorrhoids even though we don?t see them and probably won?t.'She also wondered aloud whether the patient was gay.
The gastroenterologist, Soloman Shah, was dismissed early in the trial despite not objecting to any of Ingham's comments.
The procedure was performed at Shah's medical suite in Reston, Virginia.
Mikhael Charnoff and Scott Perry, the attorneys for the plantiff, had asked for a $1.75million judgment.
They instead got $500,000 for their client, which included $100,000 for defamation ($50,000 each for the comments about the man having syphilis and tuberculosis, $200,000 for medical malpractice and $200,000 in punitive damages.
Juror Khairzada said: 'We finally came to a conclusion that we have to give him something, just to make sure that this doesn?t happen again.'
Conversations for medical professionals would normally be considered privilege, but since other people were in the room and the scope of what they were discussing had nothing to do with the colonoscopy, it was determined that this rule did not apply.
It is not known if Ingham or Shah have faced - or will face - disciplinary action from the Virginia Board of Medicine.
AUDIO:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3136989/After-five-minutes-wanted-punch-face-Man-wins-500-000-recording-doctor-falsely-saying-STD-hemorrhoids-wants-hit-him.html#v-4318110173001Disgusting. She needs to be ROASTED
