‘A nightmare to go through.’ Jury clears North Texas surgeon accused of botched surgery
On July 28, a Tarrant County jury sided with a spinal surgeon in a civil case in which a patient accused the doctor of botching her surgery in 2017.
Lesa Swanson sued Dr. Anil Kesani in April 2019 after a spinal surgery at Baylor Medical Center in Trophy Club. In the lawsuit, Swanson said Kesani misplaced four of six screws in her back during her surgery in 2017 and caused permanent damage.
The three-week long trial between Kesani and Swanson began the week of July 10 in Judge Melody Wilkinson’s 17th District Court. The jury on Tuesday unanimously sided with Kesani, ruling that Kesani was not negligent in his care and treatment of Swanson. Kesani and his wife, Shaily Kesani, said they were relieved for the four-year legal battle to be over.
“We had to fight, we had to fight for the truth and defend ourselves against some of these allegations,” Anil Kesani said.
Neither Swanson or Todd Smith, who is listed as Swanson’s lawyer, responded to requests to comment.
Anil Kesani first learned about the lawsuit accusing him of medical malpractice from several of his patients, who had seen news articles from the Star-Telegram and WFAA-TV about the suit. Patients were concerned at first, he said, but became angry on his behalf at the false allegations. Many of Swanson’s allegations did not add up, Anil Kesani said, but he could not publicly comment on the suit at first due to privacy laws. In 2022, he and Shaily Kesani spoke to the Star-Telegram about the damage the suit had caused and pointed out inconsistencies in Swanson’s allegations.
Revealing those inconsistencies was a large part of the defense’s strategy in the trial, said Casey Campbell, Kesani’s attorney. Campbell previously told the Star-Telegram he believes Swanson took advantage of the initial complication from the surgery and decided to sue Kesani for personal gain.
According to Swanson’s lawsuit, during her surgery in 2017, three of the screws went directly into her spinal nerves. After the surgery, Swanson said she woke up with severe pain and x-ray images of her spine showed the screws were incorrectly positioned. In the lawsuit, Swanson said the surgery caused her to lose feeling in her right foot, her right calf and part of her right thigh. She testified at the trial that she cannot work, travel or live as she did before the surgery.
Anil Kesani told the Star-Telegram that while the screws were misplaced in Swanson’s initial surgery, the error is a common complication that was immediately recognized and corrected within 24 hours. The follow-up surgery went well, and Swanson would not have been left with permanent damage, Kesani said.
During the trial, Swanson’s legal team spent 10 days putting on evidence about Swanson’s condition.
“The plaintiffs offered everything they could possibly put out there, and we were constantly on the defensive trying to swat it all down,’ Campbell said. “The jury clearly felt we did an effective job of rebutting everything that they had to say with actual objective evidence contained in the medical record or science journals.”
Campbell also offered evidence that Swanson was not as physically limited as she claimed. Swanson said she was not able to fly on airplanes due to her injuries and had only flown twice since 2017, but her flight records showed she has flown 41 times since then, Campbell said. She said she has not been able to leave the house to go grocery shopping in years, but Campbell said he showed the jury surveillance footage of Swanson walking around multiple stores.
In a court motion filed in March, Camp objected to the use of the surveillance footage as evidence and said Kesani’s legal team asked Swanson “hyper-technical questions... which were clearly intended to trap Plaintiff into misstatements regarding technical aspects.”
Ultimately, Campbell said, the jury found “that her story didn’t match up with the objective evidence.”
Despite the verdict, the Kesanis said the lawsuit and media coverage caused permanent damage to their professional and personal lives. At one point, Anil Kesani said, he questioned whether he should continue being a physician. Shailey Kesani said the process was “a nightmare to go through.”
“It shows how broken out system is,” Shailey Kesani said. “The framework should be, you know, you’re innocent until proven guilty. But the way this whole thing has transpired, you know, one-sided claims and allegations can be made and people already make their decision based on that information.”
This story was originally published August 4, 2023 at 1:31 PM.
