HIV Misdiagnosis Lawsuit: Lexington Man Discovers He Never Had The Virus

An HIV misdiagnosis lawsuit has come from a Lexington man who never had the virus.

You’ve heard of self diagnosis, where people look up odd changes in their health on the internet and try to guess what’s wrong with them. When a paid physician checks you out and not only gives you a misdiagnosis but also lets you believe you have a socially embarrassing and life-threatening virus for years, something is seriously wrong.

That’s what happened to 43-year-old Bobby Russell, who had been given treatments for the virus that causes AIDS for eight years. He is now suing the medical staff at the University of Kentucky Medical Center, as well as the Fayette County Health Department, for malpractice and the loss of nearly a decade of his life.

Lexington man Bobby Russell said in an interview concerning his HIV misdiagnosis lawsuit:

“I feel like I was sentenced to a crime I wasn’t guilty of. I have intentionally put distance between my family and my friends because I thought I was dying, and I didn’t want my family to see me dying. I didn’t want my nieces and nephews [to] see me deteriorating. I thought I was dying. … Emotionally, mentally, it destroyed me. It just destroyed me. In 2009, when things got really bad for me, suicide was a strong option for me.”

The whole ordeal started when Bobby Russell went in with a bleeding colon. The initial results had tested negative for the virus.

His Washington, D.C. lawyer Jonathan C. Dailey said of the situation, “The fact is that the standard-of-care-protocol methodologies for HIV testing were never done. By failing to follow the standard protocol, and telling him that he was HIV positive, telling him that he could only have relations with HIV-positives, then that damage has been done. You can’t take that back. That’s the critical part of this case.”

Lexington man Bobby Russell lost years of his life to a disease he never had, and so it’s not surprising that he filed the HIV misdiagnosis lawsuit.