Southeast Valley Gastroenterology — Local services in Chandler

Alan Bracher did my routine colonoscopy. While I was in the Recovery Room, I had severe and persistent pain and what I now know is every symptom of a perforation. I had known risks of and risk of more severe illness from a perf, but I was sent home without evaluation. I developed a life-threatening condition and required emergency surgery. Even while I was speaking with his on-call partner Dr. Schron, while en route to the ER, he failed to consider the possibility of a perforated colon, despite my risk factors and despite their inclusion of it on the consent form as a known risk for all colonoscopy patients. After 2 weeks in the hospital, and 10 days without food or water, I went home with a colostomy, and a large open abdominal wound requiring 5 months of home care nurses, several days/week. I required numerous additional hospitalizations, and two more major abdominal procedures, one in December and one in late May. It took 11 months and $240,000 to recover.

I’ve written many letters to Dr. Bracher, he hasn’t responded. It took 6 months and numerous requests for the practice to fulfill its legal obligation to provide my full medical record, making it appear as though it has something to hide. Like many other reviewers, I got charged $1,100 by SEVG when it knew I would owe it nothing and it gave me the run around about a refund after my first two weeks in the hospital. None of this experience was handled in an ethical or professional fashion according to the standards of the American Medical or Gastroenterological Associations.

If you get a colonoscopy here, know your specific risks. Advocate aggressively for yourself, better yet, have someone there to do that for you. Ask these questions to protect yourself.

1. How many of your colonoscopy patients have experienced a perforation, and of those, how many were detected before the patient went home?

2. What are my personal risk factors for perforation, and what do you need to do to mitigate those?

3. What level of pain would you expect me to say I have in recovery, if my colon is perforated?

4. What other symptoms would you look for to actually evaluate me for a perforation and transfer me to a more capable physician/ nursing staff/facility?

SEVGs original response to this review was to apologize about taking so long on my medical record. I offered the alternative response you see below, the one that shows empathy and understanding.

SEVG recently edited its response to the one you now see, touting its stellar performance.

Suggested Response:

The next time you receive a Review like this, here’s how you should respond:

Tami, we are thrilled to hear you are recovered. What a difficult experience you’ve been through. While privacy laws prevent us from saying much on this public forum, we want to assure you and everyone that patient safety and quality are our top priority. Our quality assurance process requires us to take our time and research any and all such incidences as the one you describe. We use this as a learning opportunity to continuously find ways to improve. We are transparent about our findings and if you’d like to learn more about this, please call. We should have offered this to you...

My Wife went to SE Valley Gastroenterology for a procedure with Anita Speiss and had a great experience all the way through. She literally raves about her. I asked my Primary Doctor refer me to her when it was time for me. I attempted to schedule an appointment and was met with an extremely rude employee in scheduling named Jess. She stated that when I completed online form to schedule an appointment, I selected I was a new patient; however, she found I was an existing patient. I told her that I didn't recall going there before, she explained that is was for a different reason. I advised that my wife had a great experience there and that I had a previous colonoscopy at a different place, but didn't have a good experience as they billed me several times and treated everything as out of network. She immediately became defensive & rude stating "If you went somewhere else after coming here, then you need to go back to them. Our doctors own this practice and they don't like people price shopping or getting second opinions. We cant help you here anymore".

I was SHOCKED to say the least. I responded with I'm confused, can we just start over. I would like to schedule a colonoscopy with Anita Speiss please. She replied "I told you, we wont see you anymore, go back to where you went". I told Jess, I didn't choose to go somewhere else, my doctor scheduled it and they called, I went". I asked to speak to her supervisor and she replied "there is nobody else to speak to. The doctors make the rules, I'm just the person relaying the message". I tried pleading with her. It was clear on my end she didn't care, nor was listening to me and she said, "I put comments in your account. There is nothing else to discuss and I am hanging up", and did so.

Obviously, I will find somewhere else to go, but I found Jess's behavior to be completely unprofessional and unacceptable. I typically would give someone the benefit of just having a bad day; however, if you sort the bad reviews on here, you will see that the great majority of them are regarding rude and bad experience with a scheduler (likely Jess). As an executive of a large company, I would want to know if one of my employees acted in this manor. I would appreciate it if this matter could be addressed and steps taken to ensure that this doesn't happen again to future patients. If you record your calls, I would encourage you to listen to my experience on...

Had an endoscopy and colonoscopy scheduled with Dr. Spiess. I go in for the procedure and ended up only having the endoscopy done; woke up in the procedure room with the nurse above me using a bag mask to deliver oxygen, feeling like I could not breathe, coughing like crazy, and asking if I had died. Dr told me that they couldn’t finish the procedures because I aspirated stomach acid and oxygen saturations to 60%, stating that “there was too much acid” in my stomach. Blame was placed on my medications, which I had stopped 3 weeks before the procedure (more than the recommended 2 weeks prior), because it can cause an increase in stomach contents. If there was so much acid and you saw it on the scope, why would you continue?

At this time I had gone through rounds of breathing treatments to get my oxygen back to normal and was in the recovery room. They had placed me in the back away from everyone else recovering and I asked about a dozen times for the staff to get my person who was in the waiting room, continually being denied. Finally they let them in and of course had not told them anything about my procedure, the Dr. walks back in and says “oh yeah she aspirated so the CRNA recommended we didn’t continue”. Not once was I offered an apology for what had happened even though I was laying there struggling to breathe still.. “it was in the consent form” the Dr says. I understood the risks, but for someone to be so inconsiderate and unhelpful was not reassuring. To top it all off of course this office refused to give me my biopsy results, I was told on day 8 post procedure that my results were in but that the doctors were still reviewing- I get that. I asked for the results to be sent to my PCP four different times and they did not do that, just simply sent the OR note 4 times. I would not recommend this office given their lack of compassion, knowledge, and out right terrible bedside manner.

Since I have to give 1 star, this would go to the person who heard me and cared for me gently as I recovered from a traumatic experience, Nurse Melissa, who individually...