Dr. Ehab Sorial was supposed to be the surgeon who helped secure a stable future for my dialysis treatments, but instead, the experience became a cascade of negligence and unanswered questions. He performed a hemolytic dialysis access graft surgery that failed completely. What made this worse was that I was never even given a meaningful choice in the matter--he bypassed discussing a fistula altogether and went straight to recommending the graft. I trusted his judgment, assuming he was guiding me toward the best option, but that trust quickly unraveled.
Before the procedure, I made it very clear that I have an extremely low tolerance for pain. He assured me that my post-operative pain would be properly managed. That promise proved hollow when I was sent home with only eight Norco tablets--an amount that was entirely inadequate for the level of pain I experienced. It felt dismissive, as though my concerns had been acknowledged in words but ignored in practice. The lack of compassion and preparation left me struggling through recovery, physically and emotionally.
As complications began to emerge, the situation only deteriorated. When the graft started to clot, it was the attentive nurses at DaVita who noticed and took action, contacting his office immediately. They left a message requesting urgent follow-up, but no one ever returned the call. I later discovered that his office doesn't even have a reliable system for retrieving after-hours messages. That realization was infuriating--critical medical issues were essentially being left to chance, with no safety net in place for patients in need.
At my post-operative appointment, I didn't even see Dr. Sorial. Instead, I was seen by his physician assistant, who, upon evaluating the situation, sent me directly to the St. Joseph emergency room. There, doctors attempted to perform an angioplasty to address the clot, but it was too late--the graft had already sealed. The failure felt complete and irreversible, yet I still hadn't received a single direct explanation from the surgeon responsible.
What followed was even more baffling. His office contacted me to schedule a second surgery, but once again, he never spoke to me, never examined me, and never explained what this new procedure would involve or why it was necessary. Later, I learned that once a graft clots in this way, it typically cannot be unclotted. That left me with a troubling question that remains unanswered: what exactly was he planning to do in a second surgery?
In the end, I am left not only with an unusable graft in my arm--one that cannot even be removed--but also with a financial burden of $23,000 for a procedure that failed from the outset. Beyond the physical and financial toll, the experience has left a lasting sense of frustration and betrayal. I placed my trust in a medical professional during a vulnerable time, and instead of receiving competent, communicative care, I was met with silence, neglect, and outcomes that could have perhaps been avoided with proper attention and transparency. read more