New mom bled to death on operating table after C-section, Oregon lawsuit says
The death of a new mother hours after she gave birth via C-section in an Oregon hospital was “entirely preventable,” a new lawsuit said.
Because of a “series of violations of safety culture principles culminating in a complete system failure,” the hospital let Abirami Goyal, who went by Abi, “bleed to death on the operating table in its own operating room,” according to the lawsuit brought by the young mother’s family.
Goyal was 31 when she died on March 13 at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland, a hospital part of the Providence network.
The lawsuit, filed Dec. 3, seeks $100 million.
It names Providence St. Vincent, along with multiple individual doctors and health care providers and two anesthesiology groups, as defendants.
A Providence spokesman said the hospital didn’t have information to share about the pending litigation in a Dec. 16 email to McClatchy News.
Goyal worked for Intel, and she and her husband, Kartikeya, were married for six years, her obituary said.
Goyal was admitted to Providence St. Vincent in the early morning hours of March 12 with contractions, the lawsuit said. She pushed for a while and eventually had a C-section, the lawsuit said.
After the C-section, Goyal was transferred to the post-anesthesia care unit, according to the lawsuit. While there, “Abi demonstrated signs and symptoms of hypovolemic shock secondary to bleeding. But Abi was neither monitored appropriately, nor responded to with the urgency required,” according to the lawsuit.
The Providence team “did not administer Abi’s first blood transfusion until over one hour after her bleeding was belatedly discovered” and it didn’t “clamp off and remove Abi’s uterus until nearly three hours after her bleeding was discovered,” the lawsuit said.
The 31-year-old, who’d been healthy, went into cardiac arrest and died about six hours after her daughter was born, the suit said.
“Abi’s death was entirely preventable. Postpartum hemorrhage and the corresponding increased mortality rates among minority women are common knowledge in obstetrics. Providence St. Vincent’s is a tertiary center with the capability and resources to properly monitor for and treat postpartum hemorrhage,” according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit seeks $75 million in non-economic damages, including for Goyal’s “extreme pain, discomfort, and distress.”
It also seeks $25 million in economic damages for her “impaired earning capacity, lost capacity to perform services as a wife and mother, lost capacity to perform personal and household services, as well as reasonable funeral and burial expenses,” according to the lawsuit.
Jeffrey B. Killino, an attorney representing Goyal’s family, said in a Dec. 16 email to McClatchy News that the 31-year-old’s death “highlights a systemic problem not only with the healthcare she received at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center, but with the larger systemic problems assailing the maternal healthcare system in the U.S.”
It’s time to “reverse course and address the root causes of preventable and unnecessary deaths of amazing young mothers like Abi,” Killino said.
He added in a phone call that Goyal’s relatives are rallying around her husband and daughter, though “there’s no replacement for your mother.”
The baby’s middle name is Abi, according to Goyal’s obituary.
“Our only solace is the brief time (Goyal) was able to hold and feel her and the happiness she radiated in her final moments,” the obituary said.
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