Dr. Wacker refused yesterday to name the doctors involved. UHS has been sued for malpractice in the past, he said, but he couldn't recall how often. He said that UHS's insurance company hires attorneys to defend malpractice suits.
According to the Blair letter, Mary Munch had been vomiting every few minutes and was unable to sit or walk without assistance when the University police took her to UHS at 1 a.m. December 17.
The doctor "heard her symptoms and took her temperature, and without any other tests diagnosed her illness as flu," Blair wrote.
The doctor then told her she was "lucky not to be vomiting as much" as other flu victims, gave her an anti-nausea injection which failed to improve her condition, and told her to rest at home, the letter states.
Munch's roommate called the UHS later that day to relate the incidents of the night before. A nurse then asked the roommate to bring Munch to the UHS for further examination, but Munch decided she was feeling too poorly to "go through that ordeal again."
She flew home the next day and had to be carried from the plane and taken to the emergency room of a Denver hospital, the letter continued.
Dr. Wacker cited the nurse's advice to return to UHS as further evidence that the University will, in his opinion, not be convicted of malpractice.
According to Munch's father, surgeons at St. Luke's Hospital in Denver emerged during the operation to inform the parents of the burst appendix and warn them "that there were great risks she would not survive the operation."
Munch said that in the opinion of his daughter's Denver doctors the appendix had probably burst during the morning following her initial UHS visit and that standard procedure in a case involving such severe abdominal cramps is to take a white blood cell count, which the UHS doctor failed to do.
Dr. Wacker yesterday said that treatment in such cases is "a question of judgment" and that he was "satisfied that what was done was quite reasonable."
He also maintains that UHS's most recent refusal to admit Munch to Stillman infirmary, when it was discovered later that she had ulcerated collitis, was reasonable because Munch voluntarily walked out of the emergency room after waiting briefly for an on-call surgeon the doctor had summoned.
Munch claims she left because she was refused admittance to the infirmary.
"If there's something physically wrong with them or if they just need a couple days away from the dorms we are generally very liberal in admitting students to the infirmary," Dr. Wacker said.
But he said the University was not at fault because, "If the surgeon came in and decided it was safe for her to go to Stillman the option was still open to her," he said.
Munch said yesterday that he has turned the case over to a private lawyer, and that it is still uncertain whether the suit will be filed in his daughter's name or in his name in his daughter's behalf