Retired sailor sues Navy over blocked urethra

By Chris Amos - Staff writer
Posted : Friday Feb 23, 2007 15:53:48 EST

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A retired petty officer sued the Navy for $2 million Feb. 15, claiming
that a botched surgery at Naval Medical Center Portsmouth, Va., left his
urethra blocked by fecal matter for several months, causing internal
injuries that left him unable to work and bound to a wheelchair, and
eventually caused him to lose his home of 18 years.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Norfolk, Va., was only
necessary, said Robert Peters, 61, because Navy officials refused to
offer a settlement to a claim he filed with Navy lawyers a year ago.

"I want people out there to know what's happened to me," said Peters,
who said he struggled for months deciding whether he should file the
claim.
His two sons, both Marines who served in Operation Desert Storm,
convinced him that he should.

"I want people to know what they've done. I endured pain I never felt in
my life. I would have killed myself if I could have got a gun.

"I was in Vietnam and Desert Storm and this is bull----," said Peters, a
Navy radar specialist who served 24 years before retiring in 1993. "I
have to wear [adult diapers] all the time. ... I leak a lot. I have to
change them twice a day."
Peters filed his original claim Jan. 31, 2006, according to Dan Fields,
head of the Navy's tort claims branch.

Peters' Virginia Beach, Va.-based lawyer, Jim St. Clair, said federal
law requires that plaintiffs give the federal government six months to
resolve a medical malpractice claim before filing a lawsuit in federal
court.

Government lawyers contacted St. Clair six months after the claim was
filed to request an extension. Four months after that, St. Clair said,
Navy lawyers, saying the claim was in the final stages of investigation,
contacted him to ask for a second extension, this time for 30 days.
Peters agreed to both extensions but he said his patience has since run
out.
Bill Sexton, a federal government lawyer who is involved with Peters'
case, said he was not at liberty to discuss its specifics. But he did
say the case was still in the investigative stages.

"For us to settle a case in six months that happened three years ago
would be next to impossible," Fields said.
Peters was not moved.

"What do they need to investigate? Urine was coming out of my rectum,"
he said.
YEARS OF HARDSHIP

Peters' problems began three years ago, when he was diagnosed with
prostate cancer after a routine medical exam.
Several weeks later, he underwent an operation at the Veterans Affairs
hospital in Durham, N.C., to cure the cancer. Afterward, he went to his
son's Jacksonville, Fla., home to recuperate. While there, he began
having trouble urinating.

He went to a nearby civilian hospital and was told that scar tissue was
blocking his urethra — something that happens after about 4 percent of
prostate surgeries, according to information provided by the University
of Pittsburgh Cancer Center. Doctors inserted a catheter and told him he
should have the scar tissue surgically removed as soon as possible.

While in Jacksonville, he got even more disturbing news — VA doctors
called him to tell him that his prostate cancer had spread to his
bladder. He would need radiation treatments.

Peters traveled to Virginia to visit a friend for a weekend. After the
visit, he planned to return to North Carolina to begin his bladder
cancer treatments.

While he was in Virginia, he went to Naval Hospital Portsmouth for help
because he found that changing his own catheter was too painful. It was
a decision Peters would soon regret.

"I went to visit for a couple of days and wound up being there for two
years," he said.

Navy surgeons were able to quickly schedule him for surgery to remove
the scar tissue, but while using a laser to remove the scar tissue, they
mistakenly severed Peters' urethra and burned a hole in his colon in the
process, he said.
Deborah Kallgren, spokeswoman for Naval Medical Center Portsmouth,
declined to comment on the case because it is under investigation.

Peters identified the lead surgeon as Lt. Cmdr. Prodromos Borboroglu.
Jacky Fisher, another spokeswoman at Naval Hospital Portsmouth, said
Navy lawyers would not allow Borboroglu to be interviewed.

Peters said his medical problems began hours after that surgery.
Small bits of matter began to clog his catheter when he attempted to
urinate. Every couple of days, he had to have the catheter removed and
cleaned.

For six months, Peters returned every few days to Portsmouth to have his
catheter replaced. On at least four occasions, when the pain was too
intense to drive to Portsmouth, he went to a closer civilian hospital in
Chesapeake, Va. Doctors there told him repeatedly that he had fecal
matter in his urine.

Peters said you didn't need a medical degree to know that.

"It was brown and it smelled like [feces]," he said.

But Navy doctors, ranking as high as captain, told him over the course
of more than 20 visits that the substance was blood, not feces.

His son said he always doubted that.
"There's no way that is blood," Bobby Peters said he told his father.
"It needs to be checked out. They said it was dried blood, but you knew
it was something else. It was a while before somebody looked and figured
out that he had a hole in [his colon]."

One night, excruciating pain dogged him to the emergency room of a
Chesapeake civilian hospital, where doctors told him the matter clogging
his catheter was feces.

Peters was taken by ambulance back to Naval Medical Center Portsmouth.
He was hospitalized for two weeks and given a regimen of antibiotics. On
the day he left the hospital, his discharge papers noted a brown
substance was still present in his urine, he said.

This continued for another six months until another problem surfaced.
Now he had stopped urinating altogether; urine was coming out of his
rectum.

So Peters went to a civilian urologist, Dr. Gerald Jordan; Jordan
immediately diagnosed a severed urethra but sent him to another civilian
urologist for a second opinion.

The second doctor made the same diagnosis and told Peters he would need
surgery to fix the problem.
Jordan was unavailable for comment Feb. 21.

Before Peters could have the surgery, he had to have a colostomy bag, to
collect his feces, and a superpubic tube, to collect his urine,
inserted. He had to keep them in for six months to allow his body to
heal enough to tolerate the operation.
But six months turned to 12 as his body developed infection after
infection, he said.

During this time, Peters said, he could not get out of bed and had to
hire a nurse to care for him.

Finally, he underwent a 12-hour operation at a Norfolk civilian hospital
to repair the damage to his urethra and colon, and several weeks later,
two more operations to remove the colostomy bag and the superpubic tube.

Those were followed by four more operations to remove stones from his
urethra, which came from foreign matter that got into his bladder
through the superpubic tube.

Even after the infections stopped, Peters said, the tube left him with a
quarter-inch hole in his stomach that will never close.
His son cared for him for several months between operations.

"It was pretty tough," said Bobby Peters. "He had two [colostomy and
urine] bags. He was in a lot of pain all the time. I remember thinking
that if that was me, I wouldn't want to go through something like that."

For two years, Peters said, he was unable to work or pay his civilian
medical bills, which eventually added up to more than $500,000. He lost
his home to foreclosure and now lives in a trailer near Marine Corps Air
Station Cherry Point, N.C.
"I used to have good credit," he said. "I can't buy a pack of cigarettes
on credit now."

St. Clair said Peters could have sued for more money in neighboring
states, but he said Virginia law limited recovery for medical
malpractice lawsuits to $1.7 million.

Navy documents released to Navy Times in 2006 show that 30 claims were
filed against Portsmouth between 1999 and 2006. Of those, five were for
wrongful death.

knowledge is power - growing old is mandatory - growing wise is optional    
"Many more men die with prostate cancer than of it. Growing old is
invariably fatal. Prostate cancer is only sometimes so."
http://community.webtv.net/PALMER_ENT/doc