A Virginia man has been awarded $500,000 after accidentally recording doctors making rude comments about him while he was unconscious during a colonoscopy.
The man, identified only as “D.B.”, had used his smartphone to record their instructions, but he ended up unwittingly capturing the sounds of his entire procedure. Listening to the recording later, he was shocked to hear 42-year-old anesthesiologist Tiffany Ingham and 48-year-old gastroenterologist Solomon Shah mocking him while he was unconscious.
“As long as it’s not Ebola, you’ll be okay,” Shah said.
“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,” Ingham said.
When Ingham found a rash on her sedated patient, she instructed an assistant not to touch it, saying it might lead to “some syphilis on your arm or something[…] It’s probably tuberculosis in the penis, so you’ll be all right.”
The assistant remarked that the patient got queasy after seeing a needle go into his arm. Ingham then said to her inert patient, “Well, why are you looking then, retard?” She also wrote on the man’s medical chart that he had hemorrhoids, despite his not having them.
The unnamed patient sued and won, with his audio recording providing bulletproof evidence of his shameful treatment. A jury awarded him a total of $500,000—$100,000 for the defamatory comments about syphilis and tuberculosis, $200,000 for medical malpractice, and $200,000 in punitive damages.
Ingham has already left her job at the Aisthesis anesthesia practice and moved to Florida.
The recording posted on YouTube ends with Ingham saying, “I feel bad; I shouldn’t be so mean.”
H/T My FOX Atlanta | Photo via Lauren Nelson/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)