Charlie Weis Loses Malpractice Suit

Wednesday, July 25th 2007
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I’d make fun of him, but it is just too easy. As a University of Southern California alumn I have to hate Charlie Weis. Even if I wasn’t a USC grad, he ain’t exactly a hard guy to dislike with this malpractice suit brought after gastric bypass surgery.

A jury on Tuesday found against Notre Dame football coach Charlie Weis in his medical malpractice lawsuit against two doctors he claimed botched his care after he had gastric bypass surgery five years ago.

Weis, 51, who won three Super Bowls as offensive coordinator for the New England Patriots, accused the surgeons of negligence for allowing him to bleed internally for 30 hours before performing a second surgery to correct the complication.

Weis became gravely ill after the 2002 surgery and nearly died. He testified he still has numbness and pain in his feet and sometimes has to use a motorized cart.

Ferguson, director of Massachusetts General’s surgical residency program, and Hodin, a surgeon and professor at Harvard Medical School, said internal bleeding was a well-known complication of the stomach stapling surgery. They said they believed the bleeding would stop on its own and were concerned about performing a second surgery because of the risk of a pulmonary embolism.

While obviously I know oh so little about this case and oh so little about medicine in general, I was under the impression these gastric bypass surgeries had pretty significant morbidity and mortality rates.

[OR Live: Roux-en-Y Gastric Bypass]