An 18-year-old woman in Colorado has been left in a coma-like condition after a breast enhancement surgery went tragically wrong on Aug. 1, and now her family is looking for answers on what happened and how the tragedy might have been prohibited.
Following her graduation from high school, Emmalyn Nguyen wanted to get breast enhancements to help improve her self-confidence, her parents Sonny Nguyen and Lynn Fam told FOX 31. However, the procedure went tragically wrong, when before surgery, Emmalyn went into cardiac arrest and stopped breathing on the surgical table at Colorado Aesthetic and Plastic Surgery in Greenwood Village, Colorado.
Now, Emmalyn is confined to a bed in a nursing home, where she is kept alive with feeding tubes and an oxygen machine.
"Her body is still there but she's not there, so we feel like we lost a daughter," said Emmalyn's mother, Lynn Fam.
The parents filed a lawsuit against Dr. Geoffrey Kim and Nurse Anesthetist Rex Meeker for gross negligence. An attorney for Emmalyn's parents, David Woodruff, told CBS Denver that Meeker failed to administer Emmalyn's anesthetic correctly and did not properly monitor the 18-year-old.
The lawsuit claims 15 minutes after Emmalyn was administered anesthesia, she went into cardiac arrest and had to be revived by Dr. Kim after staff observed the teenager's lips and face had turned "blue." Woodruff says medical records show Emmalyn went into cardiac arrest again a few minutes later and never regained consciousness. While Emmalyn's heart rate and breathing returned, she remained "neurologically unresponsive."
Woodruff says the 18-year-old was left on the operating table and staff didn't call 911 for more than 5 hours.
The lawsuit also alleges the staff failed to notify Emmalyn's mother about her condition when she arrived to pick her daughter up.
"If someone was there to watch her the whole time, this would have never happened," her father said.
"When an entire team of healthcare professionals realizes she's in cardiac arrest, they perform CPR then they don't call 911 for five and a half hours. That's unconscionable," the family attorney David Woodruff said.
KDVR, "I just want to find out the truth, what happened and prevent this from happening to other people," Sonny Nguyen said.