Medical Inquiry Opens in Death of Surgery Patient

The Medical Board of California opened a formal investigation Thursday into the death of a 35-year-old Laguna Beach woman who fell into a coma after breast-enlargement surgery at a plastic surgeon’s office.

Dr. Edward J. Domanskis, who is board-certified, has declined comment on what happened March 8 when he performed breast-implantation surgery on Martha McClellan at his Newport Center office.

McClellan was reportedly unconscious when she was taken by ambulance several hours after the elective surgery to nearby Hoag Hospital. The Laguna Beach woman died there March 12 after her husband learned from two neurologists that her brain activity had ceased and asked that life support be terminated.

Felix Rodriguez, supervising special investigator for the state medical board’s Santa Ana regional office, said the investigation was prompted by an anonymous tip and an article in The Times.

“Anytime there’s a death as a result of surgery that may have occurred in a doctor’s office, this type of thing--maybe there’s nothing wrong. But we just have to make sure,” Rodriguez said. “When something’s questionable, highly unusual, we have to find out why it happened.”

Meanwhile, McClellan’s husband, Orange home builder Michael McClellan, 47, vowed to campaign for more regulation of out-of-hospital surgery. “My goal is to clean this up so it doesn’t happen again,” he said.

McClellan and his attorney, Jay Horton, say they intend to file a wrongful death suit alleging that McClellan’s wife, the mother of two children, was not monitored properly in Domanskis’ recovery room.

On Wednesday, Erin Magner, McClellan’s sister, described what she saw several hours after the operation when she arrived at Domanskis’ office to take her sister home.

Magner said she found her sister fully dressed but slouched on a recovery room bed with an intravenous tube in her left arm and a nurse trying desperately to rouse her.

McClellan’s face was ashen, Magner recalled, and “the nurse was shouting her name and kind of shaking her, going ‘Martha! Martha!’ ”

Magner said that the nurse led her out of the recovery room and then another nurse closed the glass windows in the reception room.

Magner said that paramedics arrived about 12 minutes after she first saw her sister unconscious.

At about that time, a nurse emerged and tried to console her, Magner recalled, and she remembered crying out: “I can’t believe you did this. What did you guys do? You don’t know what a good mother she is. She’s my best friend in the world. . . . “

Magner said she withdrew from the nurse’s grasp but also asked, “Is she still breathing?’ And she said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘Not yet.’ ”

Magner said she then went down to the parking lot where her boyfriend, Allen York, was waiting. “Allen saw Martha go by on the gurney, on a respirator,” she said. They drove to Hoag’s emergency room to meet the ambulance.

Horton and McClellan have said that tests at Hoag indicate that Martha McClellan may have been deprived of oxygen for seven to 10 minutes at Domanskis’ office. McClellan has said that the doctor who assisted Domanskis by anesthetizing his wife has assured him that she was checked “every couple of minutes” in the recovery room, but he said he doubts that because of the brain damage she sustained. The anesthesiologist was not available for comment Thursday.