Is Foot Drop After Decompressive Laminectomy Surgical Negligence?
When a 40 year-old male professional athlete injured his low back, the surgery that was supposed to repair the injury instead left him with additional damage. The patient initially suffered a lumbar disc herniation while competing. To repair the condition, he underwent surgery to relieve nerve compression and to insert supporting hardware in his spine. After surgery however, the patient suffered from “foot drop,” which is the inability to lift your foot up toward your shin. His subsequent doctors suspected the cause was the nerve root being stretched to far during surgery and informed him he would never be able to lift his foot again. The initial sports injury was a herniation of the disk located between the fourth and fifth vertebrae in the lumbar or low back region of the spine. Lumbar stenosis, or narrowing of the spinal canal, was also found to exist. To relieve the pressure on the spinal cord that this stenosis was causing, a decompressive laminectomy was performed. The laminectom
