Hmmm but why did they wait till now to announce it..... Nicole DeHuff, an actress who played Teri Polo's sister in Meet the Parents, has died of causes related to pneumonia. She was 30 The actress died Feb. 16 in Hollywood, four days after she reportedly checked into a Los Angeles hospital, was misdiagnosed and sent home with orders to take Tylenol. When her condition worsened, she returned to the hospital and was prescribed antibiotics for bronchitis and again sent home. Two days later, paramedics were called to her home after she collapsed, gasping for breath. By the time she reached the hospital, she was unconscious and passed away soon after. Meet the Parents marked DeHuff's feature-film debut. She played Deborah Byrnes, the sister whose wedding prompts Gaylord "Greg" Focker's (Ben Stiller) visit to girlfriend Pam Byrne's (Polo) childhood home to attend the ceremony and, as suggested by the title, meet the parents. Hilarity ensues. In one of the movie's most memorable scenes, a Speedo-clad Stiller spikes a volleyball into DeHuff's face, breaking the bride-to-be's nose and cementing his own unpopularity. DeHuff also appeared in 2004's Suspect Zero with Ben Kingsley and in an independent film called Killing Cinderella. She also starred in the as yet unreleased independent film Unbeatable Harold, directed by her husband, Ari Palitz, and costarring Dylan McDermott and Gordon Michaels. On the small screen, DeHuff had roles in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, The Court, The Practice, Dragnet, Without a Trace and Monk. She also appeared in the TV movie See Arnold Run. A native of Oklahoma, DeHuff graduated from the Carnegie Mellon University acting program. She is survived by Palitz, her husband of four years, as well as her sister, her mother and her father.
I was going to post this after I read about it on imdb.com this morning. It is very sad and her family should get paid plenty but no amount of money can replace a lost love one. +
Sad, and strange. "Meet the Fockers" came out in mid-January, if I remember correctly, so it wasn't as if they wanted to keep bad publicity away from the release (even if she wasn't in the film).
That's what I thought. Gross incompetence. And when you feel really bad, it's hard, sometimes, to think clearly enough to recognize that people are trying to kill you with their stupidity. I hope her family takes action. Something as useless as this makes the grief that much more hard to take.
you'd have to show gross negligence to recover a dime for anything the ER staff did. could you get there with these facts?? maybe. but it's a FAR tougher burden. you can't sue a hospital for the ordinary negligence...the common standard...of ER staff, anymore. this is EXACTLY the kind of horror story that opponents of prop. 12 were talking about back when it was on the ballot. oh, well...my side lost! (but i'm just a greedy lawyer -- i saved TJ the time and bandwidth of a new post! )
How could anyone possibly know the situation well enough from one sentence in the article to determine if gross incompetence has occurred.
Yes, yes, of course. Hold back. Check out different sources. Document and discuss the stories from both sides. Don't jump to conclusions. Innocent until proven ... ... wait. F!ck that. Jump to conclusions. If we're wrong, and the AP story is wrong, then the hospital has a hell of a libel case on its hands, and will make a lot of money. Until then, let's "determine" away.
This is my point, I hate playing the Devil's advocate but all we know is very limited info from two sentences from the media. Here are my thoughts to what might have happened (pure conjecture): She comes to the ER. She is diagnosed with the flu because physical exam is normal and chest x-ray is normal. She is sent home with Tylenol for fever and body aches. (This happens all the time, a bacterial pneumonia can be extremely difficult to diagnose, and differentiating between virus and bacterial uppper respiratory infections is sometimes impossible.) She feels worse the next day or two, goes back to the hospital. Chest x-ray is probably still the same. She probably has wheezes on physical exam now. She is diagnosed with bronchitis. She is given antibiotics for bronchitis. (The same type of bacteria cause bacterial bronchitis as would bacterial pneumonia, so the antibiotic choice would be similar. I think the article fools one into thinking that the antibiotic choice would be markedly different between these conditions.) She dies the next day from "pneumonia related" complications. Her cause of death could be a number of things depending upon whether this was a viral or bacterial pneumonia. Its impossible to know if she would have had a better outcome if she had stayed in the hospital. For instance, she could have had the flu and developed myocarditis (untreatable) and died. Just bad luck and nobodies fault, but many people would be saying "sue the hospital" and "gross incompetence". My main questions is that most young, healthy people do not die from a pneumonia. In fact most young, healthy (non-smoking) adults do not get pneumonias. This leads me to believe that she had other medical issues that caused this pnemonia to be abnormally severe. My point of this rant is for people not to assume that anyone is at fault for when something bad happens with one's health. It is difficult to comprehend but people die everyday from untreatable and uncommon illnesses that are not known to the public. It is very easy to think that the hospital was grossly incompetent in this case, but the fact of the matter is that they probably did nothing wrong and this was a case of bad luck. (Unless an xray was read wrongly or something to that effect) I don't think that suing the hospital and doctors is justified for every bad outcome, especially if negligence is not proven.
Great post, and I agree with the patience, but the hat is on the other foot in this situation (or something like that). As it stands, negligance _has_ been proven, and it is up to the hospital to defend its initial (and secondary) diagnosis. Until the medical professionals have a chance to defend their decisions, this stands as a SEVERE misdiagnosis. Yes, we can understand why the medics did what they did, and told the actress to go home, but that doesn't mean they did the right thing. I can understand why the jealous husband decided to stab the man who was sleeping with his wife and stealing money from his bank account, on some level, but that doesn't make it the right decision. Horrible and vague hypothetical? You betcha, but the idea is still there. This is an overly litigous society, to be sure, but the hospital will have their chance to argue their case. Until then, we can bash away.
Great points jcantu. It's hard to believe someone that young died so suddenly from pneumonia. There had to be another underlying problem that contributed to it, either that or she might have picked up a resistant strain of the disease with those 2 trips to the hospital...I'm reaching a bit there, but that doesn't sound normal even if they did misdiagnose it the first time.
You can sue for anything but you might not win. I have to agree with jcantu here and say that it sounds unfortunate but not like negligence. A similar thing happened to a girl in college where her roommates brought her into ER and insisted something was seriously wrong and that the girl hadn't been drinking. She was sent home and died that night of a brain aneurism. Negligence? I thought so at the time but Im not so sure. Our college had an awful lot of students who drank alone, it is reasonable for the ER nurses to guess that she has in fact been drinking and the roommates didn't know (apparently that's how she was behaving). KellyDwyer, I'm not sure why you say the negligence has already been proved unless you mean that the woman is dead, dead = negligence. Hospitals have a lot of patience die, that's inevitable and usually not negligence.
