Sex-Change Pioneer Sues a Mission Viejo Hospital for Damages

Thirty-six years to the day after undergoing a sex-change operation that made international headlines, Christine Jorgensen went to court in Orange County on Thursday to seek damages for another hospital visit that had pleased her much less.

Jorgensen filed suit in Superior Court in Santa Ana against Mission Community Hospital in Mission Viejo, now called Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center, alleging medical malpractice. Several doctors are also named as defendants.

Jorgensen, 62 and a former GI, is regarded as a pioneer in raising issues of sexual awareness with sex-change surgery. She alleges that hospital personnel failed to administer proper treatment of injuries she suffered in a fall in September, 1987.

Jorgensen said in an interview Thursday that she fainted and fell in her home in San Clemente, cracking her shoulder bone and several vertebrae. She went to the hospital’s emergency room, where, she alleges, hospital personnel merely put her in a sling and sent her home.

She said the injury never healed, causing her pain and difficulty walking.

“As far as I’m concerned, there was gross negligence. They just packed me up and sent me home,” she said. “I don’t walk properly now and probably never will.”

A hospital spokesman refused comment on the suit. Medical personnel whom Jorgensen named as defendants are: Michael McCormack, S.L. Zide, E.J. Wagner and David Okun, all physicians.

Jorgensen had been treated for cancer at the hospital before her fall. She said she has since switched hospitals and doctors.

Jorgensen’s suit does not specify the amount of damages sought. “The money doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s the principle. What’s wrong is wrong.”

The one-time nightclub performer also alleges that the hospital’s treatment of her injury has stalled her work on the lecture and talk-show circuit, where she has in the past talked about sexual issues.

She said the injury was also partially responsible for her not taking the lead role in an Anaheim production of the musical “Mame.”

Jorgensen is being represented in the suit by Donald Segretti, a Newport Beach attorney and figure in the Watergate scandal during President Richard M. Nixon’s Administration.