A U.S. Army veteran will tell a House subcommittee Monday that the Department of Veterans Affairs allowed a student with “Islamic views” and “no qualifications or educational background” to perform a complicated surgery on his jaw that left him with permanent pain and nerve damage.
Christopher LaBonte is set to testify at a House Veterans’ Affairs subcommittee Monday afternoon that the Atlanta VA Medical Center changed the consent form in order to allow Ibrahim Mohamed Haron, a Kuwaiti student, to be the primary surgeon. LaBonte indicated that he may have signed the document allowing Haron to perform the surgery, but said he has no recollection of signing the document, “as medication was already administered for anxiety pre-surgery by the doctors.”
What followed was, according to LaBonte, a horribly botched surgery that has left him in permanent pain.
“In surgery, not only were bone shards left in my mouth which caused further infection and bone loss months down the line, Ibrahim Mohamed Haron cut my Inferior Alveolar Nerve,” he said in prepared testimony obtained by the Washington Examiner.
“As a result of this surgery, I now have a medical condition called Trigeminal Neuralgia from damage to multiple branches of my Trigeminal Cranial Nerve,” he added. “Trigeminal Neuralgia, known as Suicide Disease, is described as ‘one of the most painful medical conditions known to man.’ ”
LaBonte also blasted the decision to allow a follower of Islam perform the surgery, and said the VA “should be sensitive to the need for veterans to feel comfortable and safe with their doctors.”
“It is no secret that many people from this region and religion want to harm U.S. soldiers,” he said in his remarks. “Why was Ibrahim Mohamed Haron allowed to operate on combat vets whom he very likely would have had difficultly treating objectively or even had ill intentions towards?”
LaBonte said he is in “chronic pain” every day because of the surgery, can only eat soft foods, and wakes up every day with severe headaches.
“According to my current team of non-VA doctors, I will not only need continual medical care for my mouth and jaw, but I will have to wear oral prosthetics in my mouth for the rest of my life due to this surgery,” he said.
LaBonte testified at what is just the latest in a long stretch of hearings to examine the VA, which has been at the center of a few controversies over the last year. The VA infamously was found to be manipulating the medical care wait times of veterans around the country, and while Congress passed a law in 2014 to make it easier to fire the officials involved, no one has been officially fired for their role in that scandal.
The VA has also mad a hash of several construction projects, including a new hospital in Colorado that is now almost $1.4 billion over budget from its initial estimate. The VA has asked Congress for more money to cover that huge cost overrun, but some in Congress have said the VA should pay for it by foregoing bonuses for VA employees.
Under current law, the VA is allowed to hand out $360 million each year in bonus awards. To pay for the remaining balance for the Colorado hospital, the VA would only need to give up a little more than two years of bonuses.
