SAN DIEGO — The dreams that began haunting Randy Dalo almost as soon as he recovered from neck surgery in January 2017 went on trial in a downtown San Diego courtroom Tuesday.
Are they the hazy evidence revealing the harrowing truth that he awakened during his operation? Or are they just that — nothing other than dreams — of an otherwise routine event at the end of a successful surgery?
Dalo, a former sport fishing boat captain, has filed a lawsuit against UC San Diego, as well as a former anesthesiologist and nurse who were part of the surgical team at UCSD Medical Center in Hillcrest that performed the surgery on his severely damaged cervical spine nearly six years ago.
The four-hour surgery went fine, by all accounts. But soon after, Dalo told his wife, Karen, that he believed he awakened during the procedure and that he was having a recurring nightmare of waking up surrounded by lights and people in hospital gear. At first no one believed him, and hospital officials said nothing untoward had occurred.
But months later, Karen Dalo — who worked at the hospital for 30 years, the final as a surgical tech in its operating rooms — found out that Dr. Bradley Hay, the anesthesiologist for the operation, had recently had his license suspended by the state Medical Board. Hay, who later surrendered his license, had been found after the surgery on the floor of a hospital bathroom, unconscious, speckled with vomit and surrounded by empty syringes of the powerful drug sufentanil.
The lawsuit contends Hay and the former head of the anesthesia department, Dr. Gerard Manecke Jr., along with nurse anesthetist Tammy Nodler and UCSD, covered up Hay’s long-running drug addiction, falsified records and lied to the couple about what happened.
Each had an obligation to the Dalos under the law and ethics that were violated, attorney Eugene Iredale told a Superior Court jury during opening statements.
“They were the victims,” Iredale said of his clients, “of lies.”
But lawyers for Hay and the hospital disputed that. They said they were not excusing Hay’s theft of drugs, nor his abuse of them — often when he was on duty. But none of that impacted Dalo’s surgery, which was done properly and successfully, they said.
Attorney David Weiss — representing UCSD, Manecke and Nodler — said that the data captured by sophisticated monitoring devices used during the surgery, which measure various vital signs such as brain activity and heart rate second-by-second, show that Dalo was unconscious the entire time.
Those records will show that he was given a sufficient amount of anesthetic, and that he never gained consciousness during the procedure, Weiss said.
What of the dreams that so troubled Dalo? They are not evidence of “intra-operative awareness,” the technical term for waking up during surgery, said Weiss.
Instead they are an example of “transitional awareness,” memories of when someone is coming out of the effects of powerful anesthetics and begins to recover consciousness.
The trial could be costly for UCSD. Iredale told jurors that the damage done to the couple — their marriage was severely strained and Randy Dalo has had to have therapy, among other fallout — was the result of UCSD failing them. He said at the end of the trial, which is expected last three to four weeks, that he will ask for “millions” in damages.
Central to the case is Hay, who was a highly regarded physician at the hospital, which he joined in 2003 when Manecke hired him. But he had a drug problem, and in 2008 Manecke and others confronted him about it. He went to a rehabilitation program for four months and returned to work at the hospital under what Weiss and Barton Hegeler, Hay’s lawyer, said was supervision by UCSD.
That lasted for five years, and Hay remained sober for a couple more years after that. But in 2016 he relapsed and was stealing drugs from the hospital for his own use.
Iredale blamed UCSD and said the hospital did not monitor Hay as it should have by conducting regular audits of the drugs he checked out for use in surgeries. In depositions, Hay admitted using drugs multiple times per day and being under the influence while treating what Iredale said was thousands of people.
But Hegeler said that Hay was a “high-functioning addict” who could take drugs and not have them effect his work. Weiss told jurors that Hay hid his addiction expertly. He injected himself with small doses of drugs, and no one around him ever saw any “red flags” about his addiction.
Hay is expected to be the first witness on the stand when testimony begins Wednesday.
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