Dr. Duntsch | Three Days In Dallas | S1-E1
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A listener note: This story contains adult content and language. Imagine that you're struggling with back pain for months, maybe years. No one can tell you what's wrong. You live with the pain day after day. You feel like your life is out of control and you can't find a way to take it back. Then you find a doctor. It's a miracle is all I've got to say about it. Dr. Deutch is one great man.

He is the best doctor I think that anybody could ever go to. You trust him. And if you're having the problems that I had, you know, give him a call because he'll fix you.

We're at our most vulnerable when we go to our doctors. We place our trust in the person at the other end of that scalpel. We trust the hospital. We trust the system. Don't forget for more information on any of the outstanding doctors you see on today's show, you head to the website and that would be Candace... Bestdocsnetwork.com. That's the place. That is the place to go. Now the place to go is... Patients seem to sing the praises of Dr. Christopher Dunch.

He had glowing reviews on Healthgrades and on his Facebook page. He claimed to be the best spinal surgeon in the state of Texas. He could fix you. So you go ahead with the surgery. When you wake up, you're in awful pain. And you can tell the faces around you are somber. You think, "God, what did he do to me?" It turns out there was another story about Dr. Dench. The one you didn't see.

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Want more? Check out shopify.com slash drdeath, all lowercase, and learn how to create the best retail experiences without complexity. Shopify.com slash drdeath. From Wondery, I'm Laura Beal, and this is Dr. Death. This is episode one, three days in Dallas. I've lived and worked in Dallas for more than 20 years as a medical journalist. Although now I write mostly for national magazines, I used to work for the Dallas Morning News.

I've been in and out of a fair share of the hospitals here. We've got a lot of them. Dallas Medical Center sits just outside the northern edge of town. It's a community hospital, an uninspired brown building just a few stories tall. It's been around under one name or another for decades. And it's one of several hospitals in the area where Dr. Robert Henderson has worked during his 40-year career. He's a trim man balding with a short gray beard.

On July 26, 2012, Dr. Henderson was at home when he got a phone call from the administrator of Dallas Medical Center. And I was called in the afternoon right around 2 o'clock. They had a patient who'd just been through surgery and she was not doing well. So I was over at that other hospital probably within 90 minutes. Dr. Henderson is highly respected in the Dallas medical community.

He truly loves being a surgeon. Well, I wanted to be a physician since I was seven years old. And then in medical school, he quickly realized that he liked fixing people's problems just like that. Seeing patients diagnosed appropriately, seeing patients receiving the proper surgical procedure, and then just observing and basking

and the pride of having reversed their disease, in many cases stopping their pain, and actually curing problems. And that's what I liked. And had you gotten a call before this to come in and correct a procedure from a previous surgeon? I have. Over the years, that's occurred multiple times.

But usually it's initiated by the surgeon themselves. I mean, every surgeon has the potential to get into a situation he can't handle. Either it's outside the scope of his specialty or he just discovers something that wasn't there or recognized on the preoperative diagnostics and needs to be taken care of, or an accident occurs. For most of his career, Dr. Henderson has focused exclusively on the back.

He's even helped develop some of the surgical techniques common to spine surgeries today. It wasn't unusual for him to get asked to help with a complicated spinal case. But this call, this call was different. But I had never been called in by the administration to take over the care of a patient. When Henderson got to Dallas Medical Center, the administrator started filling him in.

The patient was a woman named Mary Eford. She'd come in for surgery on her own two feet, but after a long day in the operating room, she'd been left in agony. Now, she could barely move her legs or wiggle her toes. The administrator also told Henderson the name of Mary Eford's surgeon. I'd heard Dunch's name previously through kind of the grapevine. Dr. Christopher Dunch.

What he'd heard wasn't good, but it was just talk, murmurs in doctors' lounges. He hadn't paid that much attention. Well, I'm putting it together with what I'd heard on the grapevine. And of course now I have a deep level of concern and some verification of what I'd heard. But Dr. Henderson was also aware he was hearing from someone who might not understand all the nuances of spinal surgery.

And now I really want to look at the diagnostics, look at all the imaging that has been done since her operation. Henderson studied the x-rays and the notes. Dr. Dunge had written step by step before the surgery how he was going to go about it. His plan was correct, except there was a problem. The procedure that he intended to do was not the procedure that he did perform.

So what's going through your mind when you're looking at the x-rays and his operative notes and you're reading all of this? What are you thinking? Well, I'm really thinking that some kind of travesty occurred here because he hasn't done virtually anything that he intended to do or that he described in the operation. But the ailing Mary Eford wasn't even the whole story from that day at Dallas Medical Center.

Dr. Henderson also learned about another woman Dr. Dunch had operated on just the day before, who was also in serious condition. So serious, in fact, that she had been taken into intensive care just as Dunch was scheduled to begin operating on Mary Eford. He's doing it while one of his patients that he'd operated on the previous day is dying.

and needs expert care. And he's the only neurosurgeon there, and he totally abandons her. The other woman, the one who was already in intensive care, was named Floella Brown. Floella was 64 years old. She and her husband Joe had met and fallen in love in high school. Joe had retired, and Floella was getting ready to retire too.

She'd had neck surgery once before, a few years back. The doctors had installed titanium plates. But now her neck and left shoulder were hurting. She wanted to be pain-free before she and Joe moved to a house on Lake Texoma. Dr. Dunch was supposed to remove a disc from her spine and attach hardware to fasten two vertebrae together. He began the surgery early on the morning of July 24, 2012, a Tuesday.

Most people in the room assumed that everything was going smoothly for the first 20 or 30 minutes. Then, Dr. Dunst started to complain that he was having trouble seeing her spine. He was saying, "There's so much blood I can't see." Kyle Kissinger was one of the nurses in the operating room that morning. He'd worked with Dr. Dunst the day before and was already starting to wonder how good a surgeon he was.

So he was using one of the scrub techs from our hospital. And so he just keeps telling her, suck more, suck more, get that blood out of there. I can't see. There was a lot of blood, way more than there should have been. It was seeping through the blue draping around Floella's body and dripping onto the floor. There was a bucket on the floor for used sponges. Usually when they're tossed into the bucket, they're splotchy or slightly pink, but not this time. I was getting back.

dark red sponges. The sponges were soaked through with blood. The surgery lasted a long time, way longer than it should have. When it was done, Floella had lost a lot of blood. In the recovery room, though, she said she felt okay. She asked for ice. That evening, Joe came to visit with their son and granddaughter. Joe was worried. Something about his wife didn't seem right.

He would later describe her as fidgety. When he came back at around 5:30 the next morning, her condition had deteriorated. Floella's body was convulsing. Joe dashed to the front desk and told the nurses she needed help. A half hour later, Floella Brown lost consciousness when Kyle Kissinger arrived for work. Another nurse told me, "Hey, you know, did you hear what's going on with your patient from yesterday?" Kissinger asked if Dr. Dunch had been to see her.

I'm like, "Well, have you called him?" She just says, "We're unable to get a hold of him," which is concerning. In fact, Dr. Dentsch was nowhere to be found. He was due to perform another surgery that morning, the one on Mary Eford. The operation was supposed to start at 7:00 a.m., but 7:00 came and went.

Finally, around 7:45, he arrived at the hospital. When he got there, Kissinger told him about what was going on with Floella Brown. Dr. Dunsch looked disheveled. He had two days of stubble. He had pinpoint pupils and hardly seemed to blink. Kissinger turned to the surgical tech. So I turned to Dan and said, "I mean, am I wrong or is that guy on something?" And there was something else.

Dunge had a hole about the size of a nickel in the back of his scrubs. It was on the butt cheek of his scrubs, and he didn't wear underwear, so that's why it really shined out to me. It stood out to him because he'd seen that same hole twice before. That hole I saw Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. It could only mean one thing. Dr. Dunge hadn't changed his scrubs in three days.

Kissinger couldn't believe it. That's kind of concerning given the fact that ortho and spine surgeons are very, very much sticklers when it comes to sterility. With his last patient in the ICU, no one would have been surprised if Dr. Dunge decided to delay the Mary Eford surgery and tend to Floella. But instead, he began the operation.

Bye.

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With thousands of glowing five-star reviews and a loyal community, the results speak for themselves. Revive your skin and give yourself the routine refresh you deserve by visiting DimeBeautyCO.com. That's DimeBeautyCO.com. Your best skin awaits. When Dr. Henderson arrived at the hospital, he would call the operation that Dr. Dunge had performed on Mary Eford an unmitigated atrocity.

So what happened? Well, from the start, Dunch seemed distracted. About an hour into the surgery, he turned to nurse Kyle Kissinger. He told him he wanted to do a craniotomy on Floella Brown, the patient lying in the ICU. A craniotomy would essentially cut a hole in the skull to relieve the pressure in her brain. Kissinger told him that wasn't possible, that this hospital wasn't authorized for craniotomies,

that it didn't even have the proper equipment for them. Dutch reminded him who was in charge. Basically, his reaction was, "You're a nurse. I'm a doctor. I know what I'm doing. I can do it with whatever you have on hand and just get it scheduled." You know, nurses are supposed to follow doctor's orders unless it's something that is clearly putting a patient at risk or, you know, it's your job to question at that point.

And so that was why I was questioning at that point. I said, "There's no way we're going to be able to do it." -Dunch told Kissinger to go find his boss. He did and returned to the operating room with two of his supervisors. They also told Dunch pretty emphatically. The answer was still no. -At that point, that's when he broke scrub to go, I guess, make arrangements for her movement. -Dunch left the room with Mary Eford's spine exposed on the table.

That really does not occur, ever. Any kind of surgery is, you want to have the patient open as little time as possible. One more minute out of the room is another minute on anesthesia, so. While Dunch was out of the room, the rest of the surgical team searched for a screw that they were having trouble locating inside Mary Eford's body. The screw was supposed to go into the bony part of the spine, but they could see from the x-rays that it had not.

It was somewhere they couldn't tell where exactly, in the muscle of her back. All of us are going, that screw is not even in bone right now. It is sitting in soft tissue. It's sitting in muscle somewhere. It's not, it never went into bone. Dunge returned about 15 minutes later. He insisted the screw was right where it was supposed to be. It was almost as if he was telling us the x-ray is wrong.

He's saying, that's where I have it. It is sitting in bone. And we're like, how can this x-ray be lying? It's a picture. It's not like a computer program that's creating some digital map for you. It is just a picture. You know, it is real time. Here it is. The x-ray tech watched in stunned disbelief.

Normally during a surgery like this, she might take five or six images. This time, she took almost twenty, because she didn't like what she was seeing. Finally, when she saw that a part of the hardware called the cage was off to one side, she spoke up. "I don't think the cage is in the right area," Dunge snarled back at her. "I've done a fucking visual. I can see where it is. You don't have to tell me." But it was obvious that it wasn't going well.

He kept putting in one of the screws and taking it out again. Drilling, removing, drilling, removing, over and over. Toward the end of the operation, Dunge inserted a screw into Mary Eford's tailbone. He did it so awkwardly, no one in the room had ever seen anything quite like it. Then Dunge threw up his hands jubilantly and said, "I can leave her just like that. She'll be fine." The surgery was over.

The day after her surgery, an administrator at the hospital sent an email to Dr. Dunch. It said, But Mary Eford was far from fine.

She had lost almost a third of her blood volume during the operation. She woke up from surgery in almost unbearable pain. She had walked into the hospital on her own two feet. Now her legs were almost lifeless. She couldn't turn over in her bed. She couldn't raise her toes. She wailed and sobbed and begged the nurses to give her something, anything, to stop the pain. Kyle Kissinger went to see her.

Do you usually go and see your patients? No, no, I've never gone to see a patient in their room after. As an OR nurse, he only sees patients before surgeries. I always try to become as much friends with them as I can because not only make them a little less stressed, but to let them know they can trust me because I'm going to be there while you're asleep and I'm going to make sure that nothing bad comes to you.

He knew she would need another operation and ask if he could be there. It has to do with, like, the whole, like, feeling guilty, like, letting her get hurt, like, under my, you know, under my supervision. So I just, I felt the responsibility that I wanted to be there to fix whatever I was there that went wrong. And she was just in a lot of discomfort and a little bit disoriented from the sedation that she had.

This is when Dr. Henderson first came to see her. She wasn't mad or upset. She was more confused and disappointed and depressed. She was just thankful that there was someone else taking care of me. She said, "I don't ever want to see Dr. Dunch again." Dr. Henderson brought Mary Eford back onto the operating table the next day.

By now, he'd decided that Dunch was, at the very least, an incompetent surgeon. Maybe worse. When Dr. Henderson clipped the freshly-sewn incisions on Mary Eford's back, he saw, for the first time, what Dr. Dunch had done. He turned on a video recorder. Okay, here we are on Mary Eford on 7/28. I knew it was going to go to litigation of some sort for, you know, malpractice.

because of what I'd seen on the x-rays and what I'd seen on her physical exam. So I thought it was just easier to just film it and dictate while I was filming it. The first thing he saw was a screw just sticking up. Right through the middle of the spinal canal and just kind of flopping around. And it's attached by a rod to the screw at the level above on the right side.

Well, the screw's solid, but the rod's not solid. In fact, I just pull on the rod and it pulls right out. This is the S1 screw, which is right adjacent... As he went on, he found more damage, more hardware, where it shouldn't be. There were three holes poked into the bones of her spinal column, where Dunge had tried and failed three times to insert screws. One screw was jabbed directly into her spinal canal.

That same screw had also skewered a bundle of nerves that controls one leg in the bladder. Dr. Henderson removed fragments of bone. And I clean that up, and I'm looking for the nerve root, and there is no nerve root. And then I trace it back to the spinal sac itself, and I see this fluid coming out of a leak right there, and the nerve root's been amputated. It's been removed. It's been resected.

He removed the nerve root so he could put bone in this place where there's not supposed to be any bone. The bundle of nerves that used to control her leg was completely gone. That's why Mary Eford couldn't lift her foot anymore. To perform this so poorly and so disastrously that you really haven't even accomplished anything except injuring the patient. Henderson realized something else, too.

Dunch hadn't even been operating in the right place. All this damage, and he'd been operating on the wrong disc the whole time. Probably everyone in the operating room that day, all of the personnel in the operating room that day, could have done a better job in performing that surgery than Dr. Dunch had done. At this point, Dr. Henderson knew the surgery was completely botched.

He thought it was as if the person doing the surgery knew what to do and then did every step exactly wrong. And as he operated into the morning, another, more worrying suspicion began to crystallize in his mind. I said anyone with a minimal amount of training would have hesitated to go forward with the next step when they realized that they were lost.

Or could this possibly be an impostor impersonating a physician and a surgeon? Here was someone, someone who claimed to be a doctor, who in just two days had left one patient seriously injured and another fighting for her life. Even as Dr. Henderson operated on Mary Eford, Floella Brown's condition was deteriorating. She had been transferred to another hospital, but she never regained consciousness.

Dr. Dunch had punctured and blocked the major artery in her neck with a misplaced screw. Soon, no activity could be detected in her brain. Days later, as her husband broke down in sobs, she was withdrawn from life support. By then, Dr. Henderson had decided he needed to do something about Dr. Dunch. After all, he says, doctors are taught, first, do no harm,

And you extend that a little bit further, it's if you have the abilities to help someone, then not helping them is persisting in the harm that they're suffering. He's not like the type of guy who gets into other people's business. You know, he's a pretty cool guy. He's quiet and he's just, you know, does his thing and he moves on, you know. So it is kind of surprising for him to be, you know, getting in there and doing what he can.

To put it another way, Robert Henderson is really not the kind of guy you would peg to go on a crusade against another doctor. But that's exactly what he was about to do. He began looking into Dunch's background. In the meantime, though, Dallas Medical Center administrators had seen enough to revoke Dr. Dunch's hospital privileges. He would no longer operate there. But that's hardly the end of the story. There was nothing to stop him from going on to another hospital.

and another, and another. You see, stopping a doctor from operating altogether can be time-consuming and messy. It involves lawyers and costs money. There's an easier way for hospitals to deal with a problem doctor. Just let him disappear.

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There was one surgery Dr. Dutch performed during the week he had privileges at Dallas Medical Center that hadn't gone as poorly as the other two. The first meeting, he was very personable. He told me that if they didn't treat me right, he would be right there to make sure that I got the proper treatment. The patient's name was Shirley Mock.

She was at home one day when a sharp cramp seized the back of her leg and didn't let go. And I got down where I could not walk even to the bathroom for 21 days. The pain wasn't going away. Her doctor gave her some pain medication, but it didn't do any good.

Eventually, he recommended surgery. He gave her the numbers for two back surgeons. And I came home and called both of them and left my numbers, and Dr. Dunch was the first doctor that called me. At the time, she was 71, but still working as a school administrator. Her silver hair is teased into the same style she's worn since the 1960s. Shirley and her husband Brandon met Dr. Dunch at his office.

Well, he seemed real nice and personable. Dunge seemed nice. He was a blue-eyed, self-confident former football player with an impressive sounding resume. From his background, we trusted that he would do the right thing as a doctor and surgeon. He said he was the best minimum-evasive surgeon in the Southwest.

And so, but I think, well, wonderful, I've got the right person. Unlike the surgeries on Mary Eford and Floella Brown, everything seemed fine afterwards with Shirley's surgery. She went home with less pain than she'd come in with. But then, a few months later, she went to see him again for a follow-up appointment. Dunge ordered some x-rays and did an examination. When the x-rays came back, she was shocked.

and I could see fragments of a metal out to the side and all these bone fragments. And he said, "You've had a fall." And I said, "No, I have not had a fall." And he said, "Yes, you've had a fall." Well, he was very adamant, and I was almost as adamant that I had not fallen. Dr. Dench told her she would need a second operation as soon as possible.

He said, "You're going to have to have emergency surgery." I said, "How soon?" He said, "Right away." -Dutch told Shirley and her husband that this surgery would be performed at a different hospital, one on South Hampton Road in the poorer southern side of Dallas. -I said, "Dr. Dutch, why?"

"Are they moving you from one hospital to another?" He said, "Oh, Southampton Hospital has the most modern equipment for him to use."

When I learned it was on Hampton Road in South Dallas, I nearly flipped out. And we got over there. He says, "Now the hospital is not so fancy, but the amenities that they have are not really all that." But he says, "The people make up for it." And said, "You'll really get the best of care." And when we got over there, the place should have been condemned 20 years sooner.

Her surgery took six hours, twice as long as the first one. She needed a blood transfusion. And when she woke up... I thought I was going to meet my maker. When Shirley was four years old, she had taken a flying leap from the top of a hayloft. She limped around for weeks on a sprained ankle without ever going to a doctor. She did go to a doctor for assist on her eyelid when she was in grade school and didn't even cry when he lanced it.

Shirley Mock is tough as nails, but this pain... I cannot describe it. I had never been to the screaming point in my life, and that was the worst that I ever had.

My back was just absolutely killing me. It was nothing at all like the surgery that I had over at the medical center hospital. And I just was just, oh, in agony. And I remember this male voice. He says, "You're going to have to be quiet." I said, "I can't help it. I'm dying."

I had studied so much pain with all this problem that I'd had that I knew the difference. I was just about to die, I thought. In the weeks that followed, Shirley Mock was prescribed painkillers to try and manage the pain. But it wouldn't go away. All the while, Dr. Henderson was asking questions.

He knew there was something very wrong with Dr. Dutch. But what? It was a question that would lead to a terrifying conclusion for everyone. You think you're too intelligent to let that happen to you. But under the circumstances, I had no way of knowing that this was a fraud. I believed him. He was so convincing.

When I started reporting this story, I knew it was unlike anything I'd ever heard. But some of the things that surprised me most weren't just about Christopher Dunch. This is a story about our healthcare system, a system we trust with our lives. And if it couldn't save his patients, how will it save us? I mean, who or what does it protect? ♪ Just don't take no vacation in this land ♪

On this season of Dr. Death... He was smart, he was brilliant, he was a genius. So she had a thing for him instantly? Yes. I confronted him several times. And what was his reaction? He said, "Do not get involved in his personal life." Kick the can down the road, protect yourself first, and protect the doctor second.

and make it be somebody else's problem. They make him out like he is Dr. Death. You know what? That is what he is. He's become that. But that's not the... I don't know Dr. Death. I know Chris Dunge. From Wondery, this is part one of six of Dr. Death, an investigative miniseries about the system that failed to protect 33 patients in Dallas.

Dr. Death was written, reported, and hosted by me, Laura Beal. Sound design by Jeff Schmidt. Story consultant is Jonathan Hirsch. Associate producer is Pallavi Kuthamasu. Executive produced by George Lavender, Marshall Louis, and Hernan Lopez for Wondery. Wondery.

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