An aortic aneurysm is a dangerous balloon-like bulge that forms when a section of the aorta, the body’s main artery, weakens and stretches. Most aortic aneurysms grow slowly and cause no warning signs until they become severe or rupture, which would signal a medical emergency that requires immediate life-saving surgery.
When an aortic aneurysm ruptures, the weakened wall of the aorta tears open, causing massive and life-threatening internal bleeding. Because the aorta is the main artery carrying blood from the heart, a rupture sends blood pouring rapidly into the chest or abdominal cavity. Blood pressure then falls dangerously low and vital organs stop receiving enough oxygen. The body goes into shock, which can quickly lead to unconsciousness and cardiac arrest if untreated.
In this case, our client had a leaking abdominal aortic aneurysm. It took almost four hours to diagnose, and more than eight hours passed before she reached surgery at a hospital in another city. She developed multisystem organ failure after the operation and died three days after she first arrived at the emergency room.
The Townsley Law Firm represented her family and recovered a settlement of over $350,000.
A Leaking Aortic Aneurysm Is Measured in Minutes, Not Hours
Our client arrived at the emergency department with severe abdominal pain, a presentation that in an older patient demands rapid evaluation. Instead, she was told to sit in the waiting room. Nearly an hour later, the emergency department director noticed her writhing in pain on her way out for the day. The director triaged her personally and ordered staff to bring her straight to a room.
Her pain was rated a 10 out of 10. Her heart was racing, her abdomen was tender, and she had lower back pain, weakness, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Even with these symptoms, her blood was not drawn nor was she given pain medication for another hour and a half. A CT scan was ordered but not performed for nearly two more hours. By the time the emergency physician diagnosed a leaking abdominal aortic aneurysm, almost four hours had passed.
Because the danger is so immediate, the standard of care for a suspected leaking aneurysm is speed at every step: rapid recognition, rapid imaging to confirm, and rapid movement to surgery. Time is the treatment. A delay of hours in diagnosing and operating on a leaking aneurysm is not a minor scheduling issue. It is often the difference between life and death, because the window in which repair can save the patient is measured in minutes to a few hours, not the timeframe that unfolded here.
Severe Abdominal Pain in an Older Patient Demands Fast Evaluation
Severe, sudden abdominal or back pain in an older adult is a classic warning sign of an aortic aneurysm, and it should trigger rapid evaluation for that possibility. Abdominal aortic aneurysms are more common with age, and their most dangerous presentation, a leak or rupture, often announces itself with exactly the kind of severe pain this patient had. That makes her presentation not a mystery but a recognized red flag.
The standard of care in this situation calls for quickly considering an aneurysm among the leading possibilities and moving fast to confirm or rule it out with imaging. A patient of this age with severe abdominal pain needed an urgent workup aimed at catching a vascular emergency, not a slow evaluation that let critical hours slip away. The failure to move quickly enough is what allowed the leak to progress toward the point of no return.
On top of a delayed diagnosis, the emergency physician unnecessarily arranged to transfer our client to a different hospital. A cardiothoracic surgeon on the hospital’s own staff was available to perform the repair, yet medical records show no attempt to call him or his colleague. This caused yet another delay that could’ve saved our client’s life.
How Delay Turned a Survivable Emergency Into a Fatal One
More than eight hours passed between our client’s arrival at the first emergency department and her surgery at the receiving hospital. During that time, blood poured into her abdomen and the aneurysm continued to grow. Surgeons performed an open repair to remove a large collection of blood from her abdomen, but it was too late to overcome the harm the delay had caused.
The hours lost to delayed diagnosis and delayed surgery are what caused this patient’s death because a leaking aneurysm that might have been survivable with prompt repair became unsurvivable as the bleeding continued. The ongoing blood loss drove her into multisystem organ failure, the shutting down of vital organs deprived of adequate blood and oxygen.
She died shortly after the operation. In a condition where speed is survival, the hours that were lost were the ones she needed most.
