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She went into Montefiore Medical Center for a simple hernia operation last summer — and now she’s effectively a vegetable.
Patricia Imperati’s family sued the Bronx medical facility yesterday on the mom of four’s behalf.
Her lawyer claims that a grotesque “comedy of errors” — including an allegedly botched incision to start the routine surgery, a significant internal bleed and a putrid infection left unaddressed for weeks — left the 69-year-old badly brain damaged.
“My mom said, ‘Dr. Lee, I’m going in for this surgery, and I’m coming out, and I’m going home,’ ” recalled a daughter, also named Patricia Imperati.
“She still hasn’t come home, nine months later.”
Imperati told The Post how she and her family watched her mother deteriorate over the course of three weeks at Montefiore after the surgery, when she first developed “a giant hematoma” on her left side and an infection that a smelled horribly after that bleed was drained off.
“I saw her dwindle away. She wasn’t eating. She couldn’t hold her head up,” said the younger Patricia.
According to the daughter, her mother’s surgeon, Dr. David Lee, one day “came in to see her and said, ‘Pat, what month, day and year?’ She actually said ‘June 28, 1908.’ ”
Marc Albert, the lawyer representing the elder Patricia — whom he said is now confined to a nursing home with her eyes closed most of the time — blames Montefiore and Dr. Lee for the “very significant brain injury” she has suffered.
“It was almost a comedy of errors,” said Albert, who has filed suit against the hospital and Lee in Bronx Supreme Court. “This is a case of inept medical care from start to finish.”
Albert said that not only wasn’t Imperati’s initial incision not properly closed — leading to a lot of internal bleeding — but “there was absolutely nothing done for weeks on end” about her infection.
And by the time another surgery was done to address the infection, he said, Imperati, of Middletown, NJ, was found to be suffering from a “Stage 4 bedsore” — one so bad that it went down to her bone.
Albert called that sore’s existence evidence of “egregious malpractice.”
The lawsuit comes days after The Post revealed that a live organ donor at Montefiore died last month as she tried to donate her kidney to her ailing brother. Montefiore is now investigating that death, which came after the aorta of mom-of-three Yolanda Medina, 41, was cut during surgery.
“While we empathize with the patient and family, we strongly dispute their version of the events in this case,” a Montefiore spokesman said of Imperati’s lawsuit.
The younger Patricia and her sister Rosemary said their mom “lived for her family,” taking care of her grandkids, cooking for the holidays and spending time with her grown children before her surgery.
Despite being overweight and having diabetes, Albert said, doctors told her the hernia repair “was a ‘lay-up’ procedure, and ‘you’re going to be in and out in an hour.’
“And she said, ‘Let’s go forward with it.’ ”