He underwent surgery twice, in 2012 and 2013, at the Meyer Children's Hospital in Florence for a suspected rare brain tumor that had caused severe symptoms, including constant seizures. Despite treatment, the child remained completely disabled.
From the lawsuit initiated by the parents against the hospital, it was later discovered, reports the Corriere Fiorentino website, that the child did not have a tumor but rather a brain inflammation, herpes encephalitis, and that the surgical procedure of temporal lobectomy (the partial or total removal of the temporal lobe of the brain) should not have been performed and that drug therapy was necessary.
The Florence Court acknowledged the doctors' error, and now, 12 years later, the hospital has been ordered to pay the boy, now 16, and his family approximately €3.7 million in compensation, including damages and legal fees. The judges concluded that the boy's disability was due to medical malpractice : "There is an unequivocal link between inadequate medical care and the very serious brain disease from which the child currently suffers, consisting of spastic tetraparesis and a vegetative state."
According to the judges' experts, a different treatment for the epilepsy from which the child suffered, and a different medical care, compared to that implemented during the hospitalizations in 2012 and 2013, would have allowed for a different outcome from the one that actually occurred , "even though it must be considered entirely credible that some biological damage would have been caused by the herpes encephalitis".
(Unioneonline)
