The U.S. government will pay $9.5 million to a military family to settle a medical malpractice judgment for a “botched gastric bypass surgery” in 2020.
In November 2020, Julie Bond, a 31-year-old Army wife, underwent a laparoscopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass procedure at Tripler Army Medical Center after being referred to the hospital’s bariatric surgery program by her primary care physician at Schofield. She had given birth to a baby earlier that year and was having trouble losing and keeping off the weight she had gained during her pregnancy.
“(Bond) was a bold, vibrant, caring, loving, loud woman that loved deeply,” Beth Anderson, Bond’s mother, said Friday at a news conference as she spoke on Zoom from the mainland with Bond’s husband, Donald. “What happened to her should not have happened.”
After cutting apart her small intestines, as routine during the procedure, Tripler surgeons reattached Bond’s small intestine backward, causing a hernia that necessitated emergency surgery three days later.
During her emergency surgery, anesthetists damaged Bond’s lungs, and she developed blood clots. On the day that she would have needed a machine to remove the clots, the machine at Tripler’s facility was broken. While The Queen’s Medical Center was willing to accept Bond and remove the clots, her doctors chose to instead administer a clot-busting medication called tPA — which would cause micro- hemorrhages throughout her…
