No Way to Save Liposuction Patient, Paramedics Say

SANTA ANA — Two paramedics and a hospital physician testified in court Thursday that they could have done nothing more to save Judy Fernandez’s life when they were called to revive her after 10 hours of liposuction.

Alan Wilkes, an Orange County Fire Authority paramedic, said the surgery left Fernandez unconscious and with so much blood-tinged fluid seeping from her body that it left a trail from the paramedic van to the emergency room.

In cross-examination, attorneys for plastic surgeon William Earle Matory Jr. and anesthesiologist Robert Hoo countered that graphic testimony by arguing that what happened to Fernandez was not necessarily inconsistent with large-volume liposuction.

The defense attorneys also challenged the coroner’s conclusion that Fernandez bled to death and requested tissue samples so they can conduct their own analysis.

The attorney general’s office “tried to depict a woman who was profusely bleeding,” Lloyd Charton, Matory’s attorney, said outside the courtroom. “She wasn’t bleeding. . . . What happened was anticipated, proper and expected.”

The case focuses on a March 17 operation at Matory’s Irvine office to remove about 20 pounds of fat from Fernandez’s arms, legs, hips and buttocks. The $20,000 procedure also included a mini-face lift, brow lift and skin resurfacing on her face, neck and chest, attorneys said.

An Orange County Superior Court commissioner on May 5 temporarily suspended the licenses of Matory and Hoo pending a hearing before Administrative Law Judge Vincent Nafarrete.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Steven H. Zeigen, who represents the California Medical Board in its effort to revoke their licenses, said earlier this week that the doctors pumped 19 liters of anesthesia fluid and 14 liters of tumescent liposuction fluid into Fernandez.

Zeigen said Thursday the doctors had administered some medicine intravenously and later withheld that crucial information from paramedics. But outside the courtroom, he said that would have made little difference because Fernandez was “virtually dead on arrival.”

Wilkes testified that he found Fernandez “in a supine position” on the operating table, her legs lifted slightly higher than her head. There was a tube in her mouth, he said, through which Hoo was administering artificial respiration.

“Her skin was pale . . . opaque,” Wilkes said. “I’ve never seen this skin color in many years of service, on any patient. Her eyes were so swollen I could not manually open them to check them.”

Bandages on her head were soaked with fluid that Wilkes said resembled pink lemonade.

Richard Chapman, another paramedic on the scene, said the fluid had seeped onto the floor and saturated several towels that “squished” when he stepped on them.

Dr. Michael Anderson, who attended to Fernandez, said that when she arrived at Irvine Medical Center “she was oozing from multiple places in her body.” Though he gave her a four-liter blood transfusion, Anderson said, none of it circulated through her body. He speculated that the blood was leaking out in diluted form.

“We were still getting very low blood pressure because of an irreversible damage to her [artery] system,” Anderson said.

Matory’s attorney, Charton, challenged the doctor’s statements and offered two possibilities for where the blood may have gone. In a cross-examination that raised several objections from Zeigen, Charton suggested that it may have been shunted or temporarily stored in a “third space” outside the normal blood circulation route.

“I do not believe that Judy Fernandez bled to death,” Zeigen said outside the courtroom. There has not been an explanation of how the blood was lost, he said, “and the state certainly hasn’t offered one.”

Mary Blum, Fernandez’s mother, wiped away tears as she listened to the court proceeding.

Blum, who had gone to Matory for facial skin resurfacing before her daughter’s death, said that, before going into surgery that day, Fernandez told her husband, “When you see me, I’ll be beautiful.”