Surgical-fire reporting sought

By Diane Suchetka

Plain Dealer

CLEVELAND

There are two Lauren Wargos.

One is so beautiful, you can’t stop looking at her. The other was so disfigured, you had to look away. One wants to remember. The other to forget.

One would rather not talk about what happened. The other wants the whole world to know.

It’s that last Lauren Wargo who’s stepping up now, four years after her face was burned during surgery to have a mole removed from her eyebrow. She’s doing it because she wants to make sure what happened to her doesn’t happen to anyone else.

Recent news about six surgical fires that occurred at the Cleveland Clinic over 12 months prompted Wargo to come forward. The 23-year-old Shaker Heights woman hopes that telling her story will persuade Ohio lawmakers to make reporting the fires mandatory.

Dr. John Clarke, a patient safety expert, says notifying authorities of errors, in general, “does lead to increased awareness and information which hospitals can use to change their practices.”

Every state has different rules on the reporting of operating-room fires. Some require notification of any fire. Others — like Ohio — don’t require that they be reported at all. Wargo was burned — on her face, neck and ear — in an outpatient surgery center.

What happened to her is detailed in court testimony and lawsuit, which went to trial in April 2009:

On Dec. 18, 2006, Wargo was having the mole removed by plastic surgeon Bryan Michelowl. When she came out of surgery, she told jurors, her face was wrapped in gauze, and she overheard nurses telling her father that there had been an accident.

For the next couple of weeks, she lay in bed, unable to open her eyes, while family members scrubbed dead skin from her. Mark Bruley has been publishing articles on the causes and prevention of surgical fires for more than 30 years. So the researcher at the nonprofit ECRI Institute knows about the worst of them .

The ECRI estimates that 650 surgical fires occur in the United States every year, 20 to 30 result in serious injury, and one or two patients die.

Michelow testified at the trial that Wargo’s face was burned during the surgery in what he called a “flash flame” that occurred after he turned on an electrical device that stops bleeding. The jury found Michelow negligent and awarded Wargo $1.3 million.

in damages.

Bruley says patients can help prevent such fires by asking if there’s a risk of fire before you go into surgery, and ask how the doctor plans to prevent one from occurring.