This medical malpractice action arises out of the labor and delivery of plaintiff Bustos’ son. Due to the large size of her baby, Bustos suffered a fractured pelvis bone during the vaginal delivery. Bustos filed a medical malpractice claim against her doctor, asserting that he departed from good and accepted standards of medical practice by failing to properly evaluate the size of the fetus and failing to recommend a cesarean section. As a result, Bustos sustained symphysis pubis diastasis—a separation and/or fracture of the lower pelvic bone—following the vaginal delivery of her son, requiring surgical intervention and pinning.
The standard for whether a doctor committed medical malpractice is whether the doctor’s care and treatment of the patient deviated from accepted community standards of medical practice, and as a result, the patient was injured.
Defendant Segarra cared for Bustos during her pregnancy. She had regular appointments with him throughout her pregnancy. On the morning of April 1, 2003, Bustos was admitted to Lenox Hill where she delivered a healthy 10-pound baby boy via vaginal delivery. During delivery Bustos was positioned flat on her back on the delivery table and her legs were spread apart with her heels hitched onto the stirrups. The bones where the two halves of her pelvis met were relaxed by the hormones of childbirth but the doctor performed a hyper flexion-abduction maneuver after she was given an epidural. Following the delivery, Bustos complained of bilateral back and leg pain. She then had surgery to repair her fractured pelvis. Bustos maintains that her pelvis would not have fractured if the doctor had properly determined the baby’s delivery weight and delivered her baby via cesarean section. The baby was large, as is common when the mother suffers from gestational diabetes—as did Bustos. The pelvic fracture could have been avoided if the baby was delivered via a cesarean section.