Laying bare her anguish for her child, an Eden Prairie mother whose daughter had a fatal seizure while getting her wisdom teeth removed has publicly and in unvarnished detail accused the doctor of cutting corners and "jumping ship" while his patient turned blue and lapsed into cardiac arrest.
Diane Galleger's wide-ranging post this week on a CaringBridge page dedicated to her 17-year-old daughter includes a newly disclosed moment-by-moment account of that June 2015 day. She brought Sydney to Dr. Paul Tompach's office in Edina and took a seat in the waiting room only to have her daughter leave in an ambulance before dying days later.
The details were neither disclosed publicly during a state licensing board investigation that led to Tompach temporarily losing his right to practice nor in any publicly available Hennepin County court documents connected to the lawsuit the family filed against the oral surgeon, which yielded a $2 million settlement last month.
Before the extraction began, Tompach "did not take Sydney's vitals [and] did not monitor her properly," she wrote.
Once the surgery was underway on the healthy and fit high school athlete, "he ignored her lips turning blue and continued on with removing her teeth. He did not respond to the medical emergency that was happening, nor did he respond in a timely manner."
She added that Tompach was ill-prepared for what was unfolding before him, saying his "crash cart [with emergency equipment and drugs] was expired, and some of the medications were expired."
And describing a reaction akin to "a captain jumping ship," she wrote that Tompach "left Sydney ALONE and waited in the hallway for the paramedics to arrive."
Galleger wrote that Tompach had the necessary equipment on hand, but he didn't use it because he claimed he didn't know how. She suggested that the capnography monitoring equipment lacked a mask, "a $12 piece that would alert the first sign of a patient not breathing. This could have saved Sydney's life. I would have gladly paid for this piece."