NBC NEWS – She hadn’t quite turned 19 and had just started college when Hana Hooper found out she was dying.
An echocardiogram revealed the telltale signs in grayscale images of an enlarged heart chamber, its walls stretched thin. Her diagnosis — end-stage dilated cardiomyopathy — sounded complicated. But in simple terms, it meant that Hana needed a new heart, and fast.
To survive long enough to get one, she first needed what’s sometimes called “bridge to transplant” surgery — a procedure to place a device in the left ventricle of her failing heart to help it keep pumping.
Her worried parents, Ali and Patrick Hooper, sought to buy time for Hana, the middle of three daughters they raised near Seattle, by arranging for her to have the surgery at one of the most prestigious and largest public hospitals in their home state: the University of Washington Medical Center.
But shortly after an esteemed cardiac surgeon, Dr. Nahush Mokadam, performed the procedure in January 2017, it became clear something had gone wrong. Hana suffered a stroke, slipped into a semi-coma and lost her sight.
Her parents later alleged in a lawsuit that Mokadam had used an unconventional surgical technique that put Hana at higher risk for stroke without telling them in advance.
They claimed that, to cover up his wrongdoing, the doctor blamed the surgery’s problems on an unexpectedly “significant amount of plaque” he encountered in Hana’s aorta and removed her from a transplant eligibility list because of it.
When the family wanted a second opinion, Mokadam threatened to tell other transplant programs Hana wasn’t suitable for a new heart, they said.
“Dr. Mokadam lied about his operative findings and sought to prevent Hana from obtaining a life-saving” heart transplant, Hana and her parents asserted in a legal notice that preceded the suit.
Mokadam referred questions about the case to his lawyer, who declined to comment …
