u/Rubberduckie1991

So my friend has a displaced comminuted supracondylar fracture of the distal humerus. It happened in January and she was taken to the emergency room and they told her that it would likely need surgery. She then went for a follow up with the surgeon and the first one told her that they wanted to put it in a splint and see what happened initially.

She then went to her primary to get a referral for a second opinion and that surgeon is booked out and she was told that they can’t put her on a waiting list because of how far out they are booked. They are also prioritizing people from a hospital that her insurance doesn’t cover. They do accept her insurance apparently. It’s been an extremely frustrating five months for her and the doctors refused to do anything more than just take x-rays every so often and tell her that it’s healing. This x-ray was from two days ago.

I told her that she should contact the state medical board and a malpractice attorney. Just my laypersons opinion of course. From what I’ve seen some attorneys will work on a contingency fee basis for medical malpractice but she still worried because money is tight right now for multiple reasons, the arm included.

She is admittedly a larger woman and her and another friend of ours believe that their lack of willingness to do anything surgical is potentially related to that. In no uncertain terms her primary said that she’s heard problems from that surgeon’s office as well.

I’m just here to see if I can get some outside advice to take to her to reaffirm our opinion or to change it in someway.

A couple things to note. She is outside of outside of Portland Oregon. She is currently on OHP due to being out of work.

Any advice with this would be greatly appreciated.
https://imgur.com/a/xGkT2cP

Edit for some clarity.

Added a link for the image.

At the ER, they put her in a splint and told her when the swelling went down she would need surgery and that would be a few days. Then she made an appointment with the surgeon at their surgical center who then had the NP or the PA tell her that they wanted to see how it healed on its own. The surgeon has yet to actually talk to her. It’s always been someone else and the one time she had an appointment to talk to him specifically, he canceled and then later they told her that she needed new x-rays despite her x-rays being OK for the appointment that he canceled. That surgeons office is the one that we believe to be negligent because of the severity of her break. The other surgeon that I mentioned she has not been able to get an appointment with because they are so far out booked. That’s unavoidable so there’s no real reason to have a problem with that surgeon. She’s just been getting strong along for five months by the only reasonable option that she has to get this taken care of.