Woman Who Was Set Ablaze During Her C-Section Fails to Win a Lawsuit Against her Obstetrician

A woman named Kira Reed whose abdomen fucking caught fire during a c-section two years ago failed to win a negligence suit against her obstetrician after a jury in Onodaga County (that would be in New York) state Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Dr. Stephen Brown was not actually responsible for prepping the surgery.

Setting aside, for a brief moment, the very cool fact that Reed’s (healthy) daughter can now boast a superhero’s origin story — “I was born in a ball of flame” — Reed, a business professor at Syracuse University, suffered a painful third-degree burn on her abdomen that a plastic surgeon later described as being similar to burns he’d seen on napalm victims. An antiseptic skin preparation called DuraPrep (which now comes with an immolation warning because hospitals aren’t quite scary enough) sparked the fire on Reed’s stomach, and she subsequently filed a medical malpractice suit against both Brown and Crouse Hospital (Reed did not, however, sue DuraPrep’s maker, 3M Company, because it had issued the fire warning about a month before her surgery).

According to Syracuse’s Post-Standard, Reed reached an undisclosed settlement with Crouse “three or four months ago.”

Reed explained that she sued Brown because “the hospital’s settlement amount represented a fair, 50 percent responsibility, and I thought the doctor was 50 percent responsible.” The jury, however, did not agree that the fire amounted to negligence. Four nurses and an anesthesiologist testified in pretrial depositions that they hadn’t been trained how to prevent fires while using the ubiquitous DuraPrep, and one nurse even testified that she hadn’t even been aware of a fire hazard.

See? It was all just a big misunderstanding, which probably comes as little comfort to the woman whose abdomen burst into flame.

Jury sides with doctor in lawsuit by woman set on fire during C-section [Syracuse Post-Standard]