A 72-year-old Nashville woman remains in the intensive care unit after her family says a drug mix-up during surgery left her paralyzed from the chest down. Glenda Dorton went to Ascension Saint Thomas Hospital Midtown on Friday for a knee replacement, and her family says she was given potassium chloride instead of the epidural she was supposed to receive.
The case is drawing attention because Ascension Saint Thomas Hospital Midtown said at least four patients were harmed in the same event, and it reported the incident to state regulators on the day it happened. On Tuesday, Dr. Shubhada Jagasia said the hospital had quickly identified the cause and implemented corrective safeguards, a statement that suggests the organization believes it has the basic failure under control even as one patient’s condition remains severe.
Kristina Dorton told WSMV that the medication error left Dorton paralyzed from the chest down, and said her mother remains in the intensive care unit. That detail gives the incident its weight: this was not a temporary reaction or a routine complication, but a profound injury tied to a drug that should not have been used in that setting.
Ascension has said it met directly with the families of the four patients affected, but it has not publicly explained how the wrong drug was administered or what happened to the other three patients. That gap matters because potassium chloride can be extremely dangerous when it is given incorrectly, and the hospital’s promise that it has already fixed the problem does not answer how the error reached a patient in surgery in the first place.
For Dorton and her family, the unanswered question is no longer whether the mistake was serious. It is whether any of the damage can be reversed, and whether the safeguards now in place were added soon enough to keep the same thing from happening again.
