CVS in Upper West Side gave wrong medications to 80-year-old man: lawsuit
An Upper West Side pharmacy repeatedly doled out the wrong meds to an 80-year-old customer—first a high dose of sleeping pills then unwanted cholesterol drugs, according to a suit filed Thursday.
Retired history professor Libero Marx Renzulli claims druggists at a CVS on Amsterdam Ave. flubbed a pair of prescriptions in 2013, first with sleeping pills so strong he ended up taking a life-threatening spill.
“I was taking them around the clock. I thought they were something else,” Renzulli said on Thursday. “I took such a fall in the apartment. I hit my head on some sharp furniture. I was bleeding all over.”
Renzulli said the second mix-up occurred in December of 2013 when he received somebody’s cholesterol drugs instead of an antibiotic, causing him to collapse again. After taking those pills for a day, he started feeling sharp pains in his torso while waiting on line at a bank across the street from his home on West 85th St.
“I was in such agony I passed out completely when I got back to my lobby. The doorman and superintendent had to carry me to my bed,” he said.
This time Renzulli’s doctor made a house call and discovered that CVS had given Renzulli somebody else’s prescription for Crestor, a cholesterol medication, instead of Keflex, an antibiotic used to treat bacterial infections.
“This could have killed me,” said Renzulli.
The former history professor at Fairleigh Dickenson University conceded “I should have been looking” at the prescription bottles, but he said he trusted CVS to get it right.
“This could happen to anybody. I’m sure 90% of the people don’t look at the bottles. This is something you take as a matter of fact,” Renzulli said. He said he decided to sue because “there has to be some accountability.”
“From now on, everything I take, I look at,” he said. He said he trusts it more because most of his prescriptions now come by mail.
CVS’ Director of Public Relations Mike DeAngelis said “we have not been served (with court papers) and cannot comment on pending litigation.”
Filed under: General Problems
Another example of the faulty OBRA legislation whereby people blindly sign away their rights when a tech just says, sign here, without giving an explanation. The message here for the public is to not sign anything and demand to speak to a pharmacist.