May 11th, 2015. By LucyC

What do you call garbage? Difficult question right? Well, maybe not so much, at least not in this case. A hospital in Coral Gables, South Florida, has found itself on the end of a lawsuit after a patient who underwent amputation of part of his leg, had the amputated limb returned to him by the police. How—you ask? Turns out medical staff threw out John Timiriasieff’s limb following surgery. Yup—the just chucked into the bin—complete with tags identifying who the limb belonged to. Not the brightest candles on the cake…

The mind reels—and we won’t even get into garbage collection and land fills …birds picking over the garbage, ugh—it’s disgusting alright.

So, Timiriasieff is suing the hospital for negligent infliction of emotional distress, alleging that after having his right leg amputated from below the knee, hospital employees threw it in the garbage where waste management workers found it later. They reported it to the police. The police contacted Timiriasieff’s family asking if he’d been the victim of “foul play.”

A foul play possibly… aren’t hospitals supposed to incinerate their garbage? Timiriasieff’s attorney thinks so. And I, for one, sure hope so.

Despite the disgusting nature of all of this, Timiriasieff might have a challenge on his hands proving emotional distress: the standard legal elements of an emotional distress claim are extreme and outrageous conduct that causes severe emotional distress. No doubt Timiriasieff was distressed by these actions, but extreme and outrageous? Extreme disgust I’m betting—but that’s not the same thing. Here, he must prove that the act of throwing his now defunct body part into the garbage was extreme and outrageous, not just unreasonable.

Well, if I were a garbage collector I would certainly think it was outrageous. You’d be wondering just what the hell you’re supposed to do with it—or if you were the victim of some very twisted joke. This is the stuff horror films are made of, to be blunt.

The other piece of this is that the hospital, unwittingly most likely, released Timiriasieff’s private medical information because the tags identifying who the leg belonged to remained on the amputated limb when it was tossed. Under The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which controls the privacy of people’s health information, all health care providers must comply with the law and may not release personal medical information without the involved party’s permission. I’m thinking no one read that piece of information to the hospital employees involved in this incident. And it’s not very likely that Timiriasieff signed a medical records release form with the intent of having his amputated leg being made public, at least to waste management and law enforcement personnel. So there may well be a violation of HIPPA to boot.

I suppose the bright side to this is that at least the doctors didn’t amputate the wrong leg. What’s that expression, One man’s garbage…

This was posted on Monday, May 11th, 2015 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Crazy Sh*t Lawyers See . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.