Florida Man Sues Hospital After Amputated Leg With Name Tag Lands In Dumpster
A Key Largo, Fla., man is suing Doctors Hospital in Coral Gables for emotional distress after police found his severed leg in a waste management facility a month after his amputation.
Homicide detectives initially took hold of the case, only to discover the limb belonged to a very much alive 56-year-old man, John Timiriasieff, who was beyond surprised by the unexpected reunion with his recently amputated leg.
As reported by the NY Daily News, Timiriasieff contacted the Miami area hospital to find out what happened and was given no explanation for the strange incident. Timiriasieff and his attorney Clay Roberts believe that instead of incinerating the amputated leg, as per protocol, the limb somehow got tossed into the hospital’s dumpster still toting its owner's name tag. From there, Roberts believes, the severed leg eventually made its way to the local dump.
Timiriasieff is now suing the hospital for the mistake, calling it "outrageous and beyond all bounds of human decency … and utterly intolerable in civilized society," The Miami Herald reported.
Timiriasieff explained that the incident caused him great embarrassment and humiliation and that he felt an invasion of privacy. It’s unclear how much Timiriasieff is seeking in emotional damages, but the Daily News reports that according to an email from Timiriasieff’s attorney, the hospital has been notified of the incident and has taken “immediate and appropriate measures to address it.”
Normally, when limbs are amputated a patient signs a waiver to cede ownership of their surgical leavings to a pathological lab, Slate reported. These body parts will often be passed on to teaching hospitals. If body parts are not donated to teaching hospitals, they are disposed as medical waste, where according the Environmental Protective Agency, they are then incinerated.
This is not the first time a hospital has been scrutinized for improper disposal of its medical waste. In the late 1980s, syringes and other medical waste began to wash ashore onto the East Coast, resulting in the closure of thousands of New York and New Jersey beaches. This incident pushed the U.S. government to create guidelines to ensure the proper disposal of medical waste, the Journal of Emergency Medical Services reported.
Although the hospital has refused to comment on the incident, it did claim to have reinforced proper procedures “to prevent similar situations from happening in the future.”