Joan Rivers was put on life support at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, after she experienced serious complications and stopped breathing during an apparently minor procedure in a clinic in Yorkville, Manhattan. Unfortunately, she never awoke from the medically induced coma and died at the age of 81 on September 4. The official cause of Joan’s death, anoxic encephalopathy due to hypoxic arrest, a lack of oxygen to her brain, was released last month by the medical examiner. The details of the surgery remained to be investigated by officials.
After almost two months of investigation, federal officials disclosed on November 1o that the clinic made a number of mistakes both before and after the surgery. According to this report from New York State’s Department of Health and Human Services, Joan Rivers was given too much propofol during the medical procedures that led to her death and there is no actual record of her being weighed before she was put under with it. Without weighing the patient, it can’t be accurately determined how much of the drug to give. Moreover, a staff member reportedly admitted to wrongly inputting into the computer more than double the dosage Joan Rivers should have received.
The same report states that the doctors were initially unaware that Joan Rivers’ oxygen levels were dropping, and time is crucial during such medical emergencies. The Federal centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) corroborated these findings, and added that the facility has until January 7 to make changes to its protocol, in order to avoid losing Medicare accreditation.
Joan Rivers’ daughter, Melissa Rivers, is “terribly disappointed to learn of the multiple failings on the part of medical personnel and the clinic as evidenced by the CMS report. As any of us would be, Ms. Rivers is outraged by the misconduct and mismanagement now shown to have occurred before, during and after the procedure and she will direct her efforts towards ensuring that what happened to her mother will not occur again with any other patient”, her lawyers told USA Today. It is expected that Melissa Rivers will file a wrongful death lawsuit against the parties involved.