A man is suing New York City after a Brooklyn hospital lost his severed thumb, the New York Daily News reported.
Raymond Henderson, a 60-year-old Vietnam vet, said an emergency room doctor at Brooklyn's Kings County Hospital told him his thumb tip could be reattached after it was accidentally severed in July.
But when it came time to reattach the tip it was nowhere to be found.
"I started to panic," Henderson recalled when he discovered the missing digit upon returning to his hospital room after speaking to the doctor.
The plaintiff is seeking $5 million from the city, which runs the hospital, the newspaper reported. Henderson's lawyer plans to file a notice of claim indicating his intent to sue on Tuesday.
Henderson lost his thumb July 10 while helping clear out the basement of a bodega in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. A steel door came crashing down on his thumb, sending Henderson running to a volunteer ambulance that placed the appendage on ice and rushed him to Kings County.
The emergency room doctor said an X-ray indicated his thumb was salvageable. Hospital staff broke out in a frenzy when they realized the thumb was gone.
"They were looking under the table and asking the orderlies and everybody. Nobody knew where it was," Henderson told the Daily News.
After thirty minutes of searching, the emergency room doctor was forced to "cut the bone and tissue back and sew it up," said Henderson, who now has a stub instead of a complete thumb.
"The hospital has a responsibility to the community and its patients and in this case that responsibility was breached and as a result my client has a permanent deformity," Harley Fastman, the plaintiff's lawyer, told the Daily News.
Ian Michaels, a spokesman for the city's Health and Hospital Corporation, told the newspaper, "King's County Hospital strives to serve all its patients well.
"We cannot however, comment on an individual patient because of patient confidentiality laws," he said.
In the last four fiscal years, Kings County had the most claims filed against it among Health and Hospital Corp. facilities, according to the city Comptroller's ClaimStat report.
