Six-year-old Caleb Sears:  His death was preventable

I’m not a pediatric anesthesiologist. Most of us in anesthesiology – even those who take care of children in the operating room or the ICU every day – probably will never give anesthesia to a child in a dentist’s or oral surgeon’s office. So why should we care what happens there? Dental anesthesia permits and regulations, after all, are under the authority of state dental boards, not medical boards.

The reason we should care is that healthy children have died under anesthesia in dental office settings, children like Marvelena Rady, age 3, and Caleb Sears, age 6. Unfortunately, they aren’t the first children to suffer serious complications or death in our state after dental procedures under sedation or general anesthesia, and unless California laws change, they won’t be the last.

In 2016, officers and past presidents of the California Society of Anesthesiologists (CSA) have made multiple trips to meetings of the Dental Board of California (DBC) to discuss pediatric anesthesia. We’ve provided detailed written recommendations about how California laws concerning pediatric dental anesthesia should be updated and revised. We’ve explained in testimony before the Dental Board, and in meetings with lawmakers, why we believe so strongly that the single “operator-anesthetist” model (currently practiced by dentists and oral surgeons in many states) cannot possibly be safe.

The DBC on December 30 published new recommendations for revision of California laws pertaining to pediatric dental anesthesia, posted them on its website, and sent them to the Senate Committee on Business, Professions, and Economic Development. But these recommendations ignored many of our concerns, and don’t go nearly far enough to protect children.

Further, the DBC cites statistics claiming that pediatric dental anesthesia is currently safe. But there is no database! The Dental Board has admitted to discarding records after review. They have reported on “only nine” recent cases involving death, ignoring other tragic cases of permanent brain damage and prolonged ICU admissions. Pediatricians in California recently surveyed 100 of their members and found that 29 of them — nearly one-third — knew of patients in their practices who had experienced adverse events in a dental office.

What is a single “operator-anesthetist”?

You may never have heard of a single “operator-anesthetist” because such a thing doesn’t exist in medical practice.

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You may have read about the recent tragic deaths of two healthy children – Marvelena Rady, age 3, and Caleb Sears, age 6 – in California dental offices. Unfortunately, they aren’t the first children to die during dental procedures, and unless things change, they probably won’t be the last.

State Senator Jerry Hill has asked the Dental Board of California (DBC) to review California’s present laws and regulations concerning pediatric dental anesthesia, and determine if they’re adequate to assure patient safety. Assemblymember Tony Thurmond has sponsored “Caleb’s Law”, seeking improved informed consent for parents.

On July 28, I had the opportunity to attend a stakeholder’s meeting at the Department of Consumer Affairs in Sacramento, to hear a presentation of the DBC’s report, and to be part of the delegation offering comments on behalf of the California Society of Anesthesiologists (CSA). We hope this is the beginning of some long overdue upgrades to the current regulations.

By long-standing California state law, dentists and oral surgeons are able to provide anesthesia services in their offices even for very young children or children with serious health issues. They may apply for one of four different types of permits for anesthesia:

General anesthesia

Adult oral conscious sedation

Pediatric oral conscious sedation

Parenteral conscious sedation.

But the route of administration – oral or intravenous – isn’t the point, especially for small children, and oral sedation isn’t necessarily safer. Sedation is a continuum, and there is no way of reliably predicting when a patient will fall asleep. Relaxation may turn into deep sedation, and deep sedation into a state of unresponsiveness which is equivalent to general anesthesia. Oral medications have led to deaths in children, sometimes even before the dental procedure has begun or well after it has finished. There’s no logic in California’s lower standards of emergency equipment and monitoring for procedures done under sedation as opposed to under general anesthesia.

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How the advent of propofol — the drug associated with the deaths of Joan Rivers and Michael Jackson — changed the meaning of the term “sedation”

“Twilight! She has to have twilight,” insisted the adult daughter of my frail, 85-year-old patient. “She can’t have general anesthesia. She hasn’t been cleared for general anesthesia!”

We were in the preoperative area of my hospital, where my patient – brightly alert, with a colorful headband and bright red lipstick – was about to undergo surgery. Her skin had broken down on both legs due to poor circulation in her veins, and she needed skin grafts to cover the open wounds. She had a long list of cardiac and other health problems.

This would be a painful procedure, and there would be no way to numb the areas well enough to do the surgery under local anesthesia alone. My job was to figure out the best combination of anesthesia medications to get her safely through her surgery. Her daughter was convinced that a little sedation would be enough. I wasn’t so sure.

“Were you asleep the last time your doctor worked on your legs?” I asked the patient. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Completely asleep.”

“But she didn’t have general,” the daughter interrupted. “She just had twilight.”

Propofol revolutionized anesthesia care

Though “twilight” isn’t a medical term, people often use it to mean sedation or light sleep as opposed to general anesthesia. Most patients don’t want to be awake, even if their operation doesn’t require general anesthesia. They prefer an intravenous “cocktail” to make them oblivious to pain and unaware of anything that’s happening. Today, the main ingredient is likely to be an anesthetic medication called propofol.

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There are minor operations and procedures, but there are no minor anesthetics.  This could turn out to be the one lesson learned from the ongoing investigation into the death of comedian Joan Rivers.

Ms. Rivers’ funeral was held yesterday, September 7.  Like so many of her fans, I appreciated her quick wit as she entertained us for decades, poking fun at herself and skewering the fashion choices of the rich and famous.  She earned her success with hard work and keen intelligence–she was, after all, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Barnard College.  Ms. Rivers was still going strong at 81 when she walked into an outpatient center for what should have been a quick procedure.

So when she suffered cardiac arrest on August 28, and died a week later, we all wondered what happened.  I have no access to any inside information, and the only people who know are those who were present at the time.

But the facts as they’ve been reported in the press don’t fully make sense, and they raise a number of questions.

What procedure was done?

Early reports stated that Ms. Rivers underwent a procedure involving her vocal cords.  A close friend, Jay Redack, told reporters at the NY Post, “Her throat was bothering her for a long time. Her voice was getting more raspy, if that was possible.”  In a televised interview, Redack told CNN that Ms. Rivers was scheduled to undergo a procedure “on either her vocal cords or her throat.”

However, the Manhattan clinic where Ms. Rivers was treated, Yorkville Endoscopy, offers only procedures to diagnose problems of the digestive tract.  All the physicians listed on the staff are specialists in gastroenterology.  Any procedure on the vocal cords typically would be done by an otolaryngologist, who specializes in disorders of the ear, nose, and throat.

So it may be that acid reflux was considered as a possible cause of Ms. Rivers’ increasingly raspy voice, and she may have been scheduled for endoscopy at the Yorkville clinic to examine the lining of her esophagus and stomach.  Endoscopy could reveal signs of inflammation and support a diagnosis of acid reflux.

Upper gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy involves insertion of a large scope through the patient’s mouth into the esophagus, and passage of the scope into the stomach and the beginning of the small intestine.  It’s a simple procedure, but uncomfortable enough that most patients are given sedation or, less commonly, general anesthesia.

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