Did anything about Joan Rivers's endoscopy go correctly? Sources tell CNN that in addition to botching her procedure, to possible fatal effect, her personal doctor went ahead and took a selfie in the operating room while she was knocked out. Joan Rivers loved a good joke, but she would undoubtedly not have found this amusing.
Details of the OR hijinks came to light last week, with Dr. Lawrence Cohen, the director of Yorkville Endoscopy, apparently allowing Joan's ENT to perform an unauthorized biopsy, because Joan was a fan of not playing by the rules and so why should her doctors? It was during this procedure that Joan went into respiratory and cardiac arrest.
Fortunately, the ENT, who was not authorized to practice at the clinic and did not retain Joan's permission to perform the biopsy prior to doing so, was able to sneak in a photo before beginning the doomed procedure, so she'll always remember the time the two of them shared together. If the selife does exist, it has yet to surface on the internet, and hopefully it never will.
The ENT has not been identified, but last week, the Times spoke to witnesses, "When the E.N.T. arrived, she was identified as an observer, not a doctor. She carried a bag, according to one of the people briefed, and the clinic staff members who saw her entering the operating room assumed that she was a makeup artist there to help make Ms. Rivers look her best after the operation."
Investigators "believe that Rivers's vocal chords began to swell during the allegedly unauthorized biopsy, cutting off the flow of oxygen to her lungs," CNN reports. The clinic that Dr. Cohen ran before Rivers's death declined to respond to media inquires, citing federal privacy laws (these are the same laws that presumably prohibit a doctor from taking a selfie with you while you're passed out).
