Greene County, MO: The Lester E. Cox Medical Centers are facing a class action lawsuit filed by an Arkansas widower alleging the overradiation of patients with brain cancer at CoxHealth of Springfield, MO.
According to the suit, Anthony Zilius' wife, Diane, was one of the patients exposed to an excessive amount of radiation while receiving treatment from the hospital's BrainLab's stereotactic radiation therapy system. Late last month, the hospital announced that between 2004 and 2009 it had overradiated the 76 patients because of an error in the calibration of the BrainLab system.
Diane Zilius underwent the radiation procedure on April 11 2008 and, the suit states, suffered "acute brain damage" as a result of radiation overexposure. She subsequently had to undergo brain surgery on January 5, 2009. She died on August 8, 2009. According to the suit, the "negligence of the defendants" caused, or contributed to Mrs. Zilius suffering from severe, permanent and progressive injuries including: partial brain death due to the overradiation; severe "pain and suffering" from the surgeries, procedures and therapies that followed, "all of which would not have been necessary given proper calibration of the BrainLab system;" and an "untimely and agonizing death."
Senior vice president of hospital operations at CoxHealth, John Duff, MD, said that the calibration error happened as a result of the physicist responsible for measuring the strength of the BrainLab radiation beam and gathering the data used to calibrate the equipment, chose the wrong measuring device. The physicist is no longer working at the hospital, and the BrainLab program has been suspended.
Mr. Zilius received a letter from CoxHealth on February 24th, notifying him of the calibration error and stating that his wife received a higher dose of radiation than was prescribed. That was the first he had heard of the situation. His wife had lost the use of the right side of her body following her radiation treatment on April 11, 2008.
