Woman Suing Doctors, Hospital For Cutting Off Care To Ex-Husband

A suburban hospital and three doctors are being sued for more than $1 million by a woman who says her ex-husband, debilitated by a stroke, opposed his family’s decision to cut off lifesupport systems.

Kate Kaemerle, who says her exhusband communicated his desire for continued care by blinking his eyes, is seeking damages for negligence on his behalf.

Attorneys for Highline Community Hospital in Burien say Scott Horn was not responding to her questions - that he was blinking his eyes involuntarily.

None of the doctors who examined him believed he was communicating, they told jurors in King County Superior Court on Tuesday.

Horn, severely disabled from a stroke suffered in 1991 when he was 37, is living in an Anchorage nursing home.

He lay in his hospital bed for five days without food or water in December 1993 after the hospital decided to grant his family’s request to disconnect life-support systems.

Kaemerle then obtained a court order directing the hospital to hook him back up.

She had remained friends with Horn after their divorce, visited him regularly at Highline Community and was in a position to know his capabilities, said Kaemerle’s attorney, Kathryn Tucker.

Hospital staffers were not thorough enough when they explored whether Horn was in a vegetative state, Tucker said, and should have checked more carefully when Kaemerle told them Horn was communicating with her by blinking his eyes.

When his family asked the hospital to end life-support, Horn was almost completely paralyzed, had to be fed through tubes in his stomach, was “profoundly brain damaged, was unable to speak, and was incontinent,” said Carol Moody, an attorney for the doctors.

The hospital granted the family’s request to withhold life-support only after a neurologist concluded Horn couldn’t recover, and after a careful review by the hospital’s ethics committee, said hospital attorney Kim Baker.

Kaemerle, acting as his legal guardian, is seeking in excess of $1 million in damages for Horn.