When Margaret DiBari stepped off a West🦂 Side pier onto the Celebrity🦹 cruise ship Zenith in June 1997, she expected to enjoy a carefree week-long jaunt to Bermuda and back.
But the trip turned deadly. The 47-year-old Queens woman died of a heart attack five days after she returned home – because the cruise ship’s doctors repeatedly misdiagnosed her condition and refused to have her flown home for care, her mother charges.
Marie Ann Ryan, 71, has filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Celebri💃ty and the two foreign-trained𓄧 doctors who treated her daughter, charging they failed to spot blatant signs of a heart attack and even misread their own X-ray.
DiBari – who Ryan described as a caring, upbeat woman who inspected nursing homes for the federal Health Care Financing Administration – took the cruise with several co-workers.
Two days after boarding, she went to the infirmary, complaining of chest pain and shortness of breath, ♐according to the suit filed in U.S. District Court in 💎Manhattan.
There, Drs. Juan Pablo Sarmiento and German Leon took an X-ray, diagnosed bronchitis, and gave DiBari the steroid drug Prednisone and an inhaler treatment to clear up chest cꦫongestion.
But DiBari’s condition didn’t improve. She returned to sick bay twice more in the next two days, but no electrocardiogram or other tests were performed, said Ryan’s lawyer Andrew Carboy.
Ryan said she spoke by telephone to her daugܫhter on the ship and grew increasingly alarmed.
She said she phoned Celebrity’s headquarters, spoke to an employee, who called himself “Alfonso,” and demanded that he have her daughter – then on the ship docked in Bermuda – flown back to New York for hospitalization.
“Celebrity can’t afford that,” Ryan quoted Alfonso as saying.
After Ryan offered to pay, Alfonso called back to say “I just spoke to the doctor, and he said your daughter’s fine to continue her cruise.”
𒆙 When the Zenith finally docked in New York, Ryan took her daughter home, but grew frightened by her condition and rushed her to Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She died there four days later of ಌa second, more severe heart attack, the lawsuit states.
“She was my soulmate. She was my lifeline,” a distraught Ryan said of the oldest of her eight children.
“Faith is faith, but it’s cruel to know she suffered,” she said. “The whole time she was sick, all they did was send her two pillows.”
DiBari, who lived next door to her mother in Woodside, Queens, h🔜ad no previous heart disease or any🧜 other medical problems, said Ryan.
She slammed the cruise line, noting, “In the brochures they have state-of-the-art beauty salons, a state-of-the-art gym, but it’s not a state-of-the-art medical unit.”
“These people have to know that when people come down sick, you take her blood, take a cardiogram – that’s all I’m asking.”
Carboy, Ryan’s lawyer, said the cruise line has claimed in court that it can’t be sued for malpractice because its doctors are independent contractors.
Celebrity Cruises spokeswoman Bridget Serchak refused to discuss the suit, saying “we don’t comment on litigation that’s ongoing.”
In court documents⛄, the cruise line has disputed every accusation.
Because most cruise ships are registered in foreign lands, the U.S. can’t dictate the medical treatment they provide. But in 1996, major cruise lines like Celebrity agreed to abide by a voluntary set of standards, including advanced cardiac care.
Those standards, when followed, should guarantee passengers adequate care, two medical experts t🃏old The Post.
“Virtually all cruise ships can take care of heart attacks almost as well as you can at a shore-side hospital,” said Dr. Theodore Harrison, a past president of the cruise line section of the American College of Emergency Physicians, which helped develop the shipboard medical guidelines.
The fact that cruise line doctors are usually foreign-trained doesn’t necessarily mean passengers will get substandard care, said Dr. John Ostuni, president of the New York State Medical Society.
But he stressed when a heart problem exists, the patient should be removed to a hospital i𒁏mm꧃ediately.