Letters & E-Mails

Pink Panty Stunt Indefensible
Re: "Man Sues After Waking From Colonoscopy Wearing Pink Panties". No matter how funny the staff involved thought they were being, this behavior is indefensible. Any adult and licensed professional should have known better than to participate in such a stunt. The plaintiff will recover on this issue, because there is no acceptable explanation for this. The facility has no one to blame but itself for this egregious behavior.

Louis G. Stanfield, CRNA, PhD
Mercy Medical Center
Sioux City, Iowa
[email protected]

Rescuing Joan Rivers
Re: "The Death of Joan Rivers: What Went Wrong?" (October, page 26). Assuming laryngospasm was the likely culprit, whether dedicated anesthesia providers were present or not, what sort of ENT surgeon does not know how to puncture the cricothyroid membrane (when a patient is approaching extremis) to bypass a laryngospasm he is unable to manage? Failing such a cosmetically disfiguring maneuver, even directly spraying the spasming vocal cords with lidocaine would have probably saved Ms. Rivers from death.

Barry L. Friedberg, MD
Corona del Mar, Calif.
? [email protected]

For the Record
The McGrath Video Laryngoscope pictured in "Video Views of Airway Visualization Devices" (September, p. 56) should have been listed as a product of Teleflex, not LMA North America, the subsidiary company that Teleflex acquired in 2012.