Lawsuit claims Stanford injected woman with wrong imaging dye, and now she can barely walk

Last July, Alice Brock began feeling unwell and slightly dizzy in the evening after what was supposed to be a routine medical procedure at Stanford Medical Center, so she went to bed early, she said Friday — after filing a lawsuit against Stanford Medicine and clinical staff over alleged fallout from the treatment.

“At midnight my eyes just popped open,” said Brock, 75, who owns a publishing company with her husband and was living in Menlo Park at the time. “I wasn’t able to move my legs. I turned to my husband and said, ‘Something’s terribly wrong, call 911.’”

Brock had undergone a routine scan to check the functioning of an implanted pump that suffuses her spinal canal with muscle relaxant to reduce spasticity resulting from a spinal cord injury in a horse-riding accident when she was 17. During the procedure, called a myelogram, dye is injected into the spinal canal, allowing doctors to use a scan to see how well the internal pump is working.

But, her lawsuit filed Wednesday in San Mateo County Superior Court alleges, her doctor used the wrong dye, and now she struggles to walk.

Stanford University, which runs Stanford Medicine, declined to comment on the lawsuit, saying patient-privacy laws prohibit it from publicly discussing individual patients’ care or treatment.

Brock and her husband Robert Most, her co-plaintiff in the lawsuit, are seeking unspecified damages.

According to Brock’s lawsuit, the dye her doctor used, Omnipaque 350, is not appropriate for injection into the spinal canal, with the dye’s box labeled with an FDA-approved warning about risks including paralysis from injecting the wrong concentration of iodine.

After the procedure, Brock said in an interview that she initially couldn’t move her legs, and had limited sensation in them. But the next day she was able to take a couple of steps, with support from clinical staff, she said.

Over the next six months, her mobility improved in a “tiny progression,” then plateaued. She has not recovered further, she said.

Brock said that she had to leave her four-story home of 45 years because of its stairs, and will be moving into a Palo Alto continuing-care retirement community in the fall.

She has used a walker for about 10 years and leg braces for about four years, but said she had previously been able to go up and down the stairs in her home all day, and walk along a dock to get on her son’s boat.

Now, she said, “my walking is very difficult and very slow.” She and her husband are temporarily living in a one-story home in Washington state.

“I cannot easily get in and out of a car. I can’t stand up from chairs without help — wherever I am, I have to be lifted out of the chair,” she said. “I can’t travel with my husband. If everybody walks outside and into the yard to hang out with the grandchildren, I can’t do that.”

Brock’s lawyer Loren Schwartz said the doctor’s alleged mistake resulted in “devastating neurological consequences,” and he hoped the lawsuit would prompt Stanford to investigate and make changes.

“We want to make sure this doesn’t happen to other patients,” Schwartz said.