Unfortunate: A 30-year old man, already paralyzed from the waist down, suffered further damage after falling off the gurney during a chest X-ray

“Nathan Ogden, 30, whose lower body had been paralyzed by a 2001 skiing accident, sued the hospital after his neck was broken in a gurney accident in 2003, causing him to lose most of his upper body function. The jury found the hospital was negligent in providing medical care to Ogden.

At the time of the gurney accident, Ogden was suffering from pneumonia. His wife called an ambulance after she could not wake him up, and he was taken to St. Luke’s in Meridian.

Once there, the unconscious man was placed on a gurney and wheeled into an X-ray room, Ogden’s lawyer Rex Blackburn said. A hospital employee sat Ogden up at an angle and didn’t secure him to the gurney before lowering a side rail, Blackburn said. Ogden fell out of the gurney, breaking his neck at the fifth and sixth vertebrae.”