Suit Alleges Hospitals Erred in Woman’s Death : Law: Family says the three facilities should have done more for the 25-year-old before she succumbed to an aspirin overdose.

A Glendale woman’s family has sued Camarillo State Hospital, Ventura’s Community Memorial Hospital and the Buenaventura Medical Clinic, alleging that their faulty treatment led to her death from an aspirin overdose.

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Feverish and hyperventilating, 25-year-old Jennifer Abigayle McIntyre died Sept. 12, 1993, after five hours in the emergency room of Community Memorial, said the lawsuit filed in February by her mother, Dr. Judith Vukov.

The causes of death, according to the county coroner: aspirin toxicity and undue delay in diagnosis.

That night in the emergency room, Vukov found caches of aspirin--tablets that fell from her daughter’s pockets and a large bottle of it in her purse--and warned doctors about it, the suit says.

McIntyre often had complained of headaches and “must have been just chugging those aspirin,” Vukov said in an interview.

However, the suit says, the emergency room staff failed to treat McIntyre for the overdose in time, and Vukov watched her only child die five hours after they arrived.

The suit also alleges that staff members at Camarillo State Hospital--who released McIntyre on a pass the day before her death to go shopping with her mother--failed to treat her mental and physical ailments.

Last month, the state Department of Health Services finished the second of two investigations.

Although the state did not blame either hospital for McIntyre’s death, the investigations found that both facilities had violated state law and ordered them to correct illegal procedures.

Investigators ruled that Community Memorial mishandled orders for a blood test for aspirin levels in McIntyre’s body. Communications procedures were corrected in late 1993, records show.

And at Camarillo State, where McIntyre was under the care of UCLA’s psychiatric research unit, investigators found numerous gaps in doctors’ and nurses’ progress notes and a lack of an overall treatment plan for her physical problems. Hospital officials recently filed a response to the report, outlining plans for correcting the inadequate procedures.

The state did not investigate the clinic since it is not licensed as a state health care facility.

The violations were not serious enough to merit fines, said Lana Pimbley of the state Department of Health Services.

But “there’s a penalty in that they have to make corrections” to their procedures, monitor them and allow state inspectors to monitor them, she said.

Officials at Community Memorial, Camarillo State and Buenaventura Medical Clinic declined to comment this week on McIntyre’s death.

But Timothy Kuehnel, a staff psychiatrist for the UCLA research unit at Camarillo State, said the allegations of gaps in McIntyre’s medical record were “not accurate.”

“The nurse’s notes were there,” Kuehnel said. “Sometimes you don’t have a note from every single individual on the treatment team.”

Vukov’s lawsuit seeks to pin the blame for her daughter’s death squarely on the hospitals and their staffs.

“I sent them a girl who was bright, intelligent, bilingual, who was expecting to go back to college and who had a lot of friends,” said Vukov, a Glendale psychiatrist, “and I ended up with a dead person.”

McIntyre, known to her family as Abby, had first shown psychological problems at age 6 or 7, her mother said in an interview.

Although her wild gesticulations and outbursts were later diagnosed as Tourette’s syndrome, she graduated from Glendale High and entered USC, her mother said.

But about the same time, she began using illegal drugs, her mother said, and started to get sicker, sometimes suffering delusions and growing violent.

McIntyre took a medical leave from USC and began a series of hospitalizations that eventually landed her at Camarillo State in May, 1991, her mother said.

Worried that McIntyre’s condition would not improve in the acute psychiatric units there, Vukov said she got her admitted to the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute research unit on the Camarillo campus in July, 1993.

On Sept. 11 of that year, Vukov said, she took her daughter out shopping on a day pass.

McIntyre had flu-like symptoms all day, Vukov said, and when they sat down to eat at nightfall, her daughter began hyperventilating.

Vukov rushed McIntyre to the urgent care center at Buenaventura Medical Clinic, where she was found to be suffering a fever and chest pain, and vomiting, the suit says.

There, the lawsuit alleges, Vukov found aspirin tablets among her daughter’s belongings, saw that her daughter’s symptoms looked like those of an aspirin overdose and asked doctors to treat it.

Doctors told her they had ordered a blood test to determine the level of aspirin in her body, but no results came, the suit says.

Then, the suit alleges, doctors told the two women to go back to Camarillo State, despite the distance and McIntyre’s worsening medical condition.

Vukov took her daughter directly to the emergency room at Community Memorial, where they arrived about 10 p.m., the suit says.

She told doctors about the possible aspirin overdose and warned them again, about two hours later, when she found a large bottle of the drug in her daughter’s purse, the suit says.

But they failed to give her proper treatment for aspirin poisoning, such as putting her on a heart monitor or giving her fluids intravenously, the suit says.

Over the next five hours, the suit says, McIntyre’s condition worsened.

And at 3:39 a.m., records show, she died.

The lawsuit filed in Ventura County Superior Court asks for unspecified damages, alleging that Vukov lost McIntyre’s companionship and suffered a shock at her daughter’s death.

Twenty months after her daughter’s death, Vukov’s voice still shakes at the memory.

It was especially difficult for Vukov, an M.D., to watch the treatment her daughter was getting in the hours before she died and then to learn McIntyre was getting inadequate care at Camarillo State Hospital, Vukov said.

“This means they don’t know what was happening to their patients at all,” Vukov said of the investigation’s findings. “If there’s no control, how can they possibly say this is research?

“When you’re brought up in this medical [world],” she added, “you want to believe they’re doing the right job.”