ON Feb. 16, Susan Malitz, a 56-year-old Connecticut woman, was admitted to Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital for what was to be a routine face-lift. The mood of the hospital staff and the patients was mindful caution. A month before, the novelist Olivia Goldsmith died after going into cardiac arrest during cosmetic surgery there. But Mrs. Malitz, whose husband is a physician, was confident enough to proceed. She would be under the care of Dr. Sherrell J. Aston, the highly regarded chairman of the hospital's plastic surgery department, and Dr. Gary Mellen, an anesthesiologist with an excellent record in patient safety. It seemed a statistical impossibility that anything could go wrong, plastic surgeons on the hospital's staff said, that lightning could strike twice in the same spot.
But, in fact, it did. Mrs. Malitz, under sedation, was given an injection of lidocaine -- a local anesthetic -- combined with epinephrine to prepare her further for surgery. Soon afterward, her heart began to race -- as high as 240 beats a minute. She went into cardiac arrest. Though doctors worked frantically to resuscitate her, 92 minutes later, according to Thomas A. Moore, the lawyer representing her estate, she died.
