In October 2015, Canadian Paul Johnson underwent open heart surgery to correct a defect in his aortic value. Unfortunately, the surgery didn’t go as expected due to a contaminated medical device. And now litigation is pending.
Now, the 68-year-old sits in constant pain, unable to move freely around his house on his own. He takes a cocktail of antibiotics and painkillers every day, and his wife, Cathy Johnson, has become his full-time caregiver.
During that open heart surgery in 2015, Johnson was exposed to a slow-growing bacteria, called M. chimaera, that has ravaged his body. “The hardest thing is seeing somebody you love in a lot of pain and not being able to do the things that they want to do in life,” said Cathy.
Johnson is part of a class-action lawsuit that was launched because contaminated medical devices used in open heart surgeries led to serious, and in some cases deadly, M. chimaera infections.
Read the full article on CBC.