Metro

Amputee says hospital security guards mangled her prosthetic leg

Sue GrubeVictor Alcorn

A Long Island amputee says a local hospital literally left her without a leg to stand on.

Sue Grube, 62, of Westhampton Beach, claims in a new lawsuit that a pair of security guards broke her prosthetic leg after crudely yanking her out of her hospital room and then dumping her at a bus stop while she was still recuperating from a procedure on her intact leg.

Her prosthesis was mangled “in a brutal and grotesque SWAT-team like extraction … as if she were a dangerous terrorist, rather than a recuperating amputee surgery patient,” Grube alleges in her Suffolk County civil suit.

Grube was recuperating from unrelated surgeries on her left shoulder and intact left leg when she asked for a Valium from a Peconic Bay Medical Center nurse in Riverhead last August, papers state.

Grube, a former nurse, had previously lost her right leg at the knee after a 2014 motorcycle accident, according to her attorney Vesselin Mitev.

But despite having been given a prescription by her doctor that morning — less than a day after going under the knife — the nurse refused to hand one over, Grube claims in the suit.

“I was all bandaged up,” Grube told The Post. “At this point, I had one working limb out of four and just wanted to calm down after going through this at the hospital.”

Grube said she began to reach for an extra Valium that she had in her pocketbook before the nurse tried to snatch it away from her.

“We had a tug of war and all of a sudden she called security,” Grube said. “She told them to get me the hell out of the room.”

Grube said a pair of hospital guards each grabbed her by the armpits and dragged her out of the hospital with her prosthesis dangling.

“I had bandages all over my left shoulder and knee and had my prosthetic on,” Grube said. “I could barely move anything.”

Despite orders from her doctor to remain in the hospital for a week to recuperate, Grube said the security guards left her in a heap at a bus stop.

“They dropped me right there,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it. They dropped me so hard that the prosthetic leg broke.”

Grube was forced to call her neighbor in Westhampton Beach to come pick her up, and she recuperated at home.

“They wouldn’t return calls from my lawyer for a month,” she said, adding that her prosthetic leg is now useless and that she has developed sores from being immobilized since the incident.

“Peconic Bay Medical Center strongly denies the allegations in the complaint and will vigorously defend itself against any lawsuit,” a hospital spokesman said, adding, “Available security footage does not support the plaintiff’s version of events.”

But Grube lawyer Mitev said, “The video has been asked for and was never provided.”

The Post also asked for a copy of the footage Tuesday but a hospital spokeswoman said the request would have to go through their legal department.