NEW YORK -- Andy Warhol wore a crystal and took other desperate measures to avoid going into New York Hospital, where he died despite what hospital officials maintain was proper treatment, lawyers defending the prestigious facility said Thursday.
The lawyers also argued that no one could have prevented Warhol's death.
The pop art guru so delayed needed surgery that his infected gall bladder was gangrenous and his health weakened, said the lawyers, who insisted that Warhol died from an unpredictable heart attack, not an overdose of intravenous fluid as a lawyer for his estate has argued.
'To claim there was a fluid overload in this case is bunk, baloney and a fantasy,' said Glenn Dopf, the lawyer for Warhol's internist of 24 years, Dr. Denton Cox, and his surgeon, Dr. Bjorn Thorbjarnarson.
Warhol's older brothers, John and Paul Warhola, both from the Pittsburgh area, are seeking damages from the hospital, a private duty nurse and 11 staff doctors and nurses for the income they lost due to the famed artist's death.
Warhol, 58, died on Feb 22, 1987, two days after entering New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center for what doctors described as routine gall bladder and hernia surgery.
Cox, who diagnosed Warhol's gall bladder problem and recommended the organ be removed, even tried to help obtain an experimental drug from Japan when Warhol was adament about not having surgery, Dopf said.
Terrified of hospitals since his coal miner father died while Warhol was a child, the artist turned to a chiropractor and nutritionist, whose advice included wearing a small crystal, the lawyer said.
By the time his pain became unbearable in February 1987, Warhol was dehydrated and unable to eat. His surgeon, an expert from Iceland, found the organ 'on the verge of perforating' and in danger 'of spilling the infection into (Warhol's) belly,' Dopf said.
Both doctors visited Warhol after he underwent four hours of surgery and found him awake and even able to walk around, make phone calls and watch television, the lawyer said.
Dopf said by the time Thorbjarnarson, the last doctor to see Warhol, saw him at 7 p.m. on the eve of his death, Warhol had received seven of the nine quarts of intravenous fluid that a lawyer for Warhol's estate has claimed drowned him 'in his own lungs.'
Yet Thorbjarnarson saw no sign that Warhol's lungs were filling with liquid, said Dopf, making a gasping sound to mimic a person with congested lungs.
'There was no fluid overload,' he said.
The fatal heart attack was not due to any detectable problem but was due to an electrical irregularity that each year unexpectedly takes the lives of 400,000 Americans, he said.
Speaking earlier for New York Hospital, attorney Bruce Habian challenged the plaintiffs' argument that Warhol thrashed about in his bed before dying.
'He passed silently and quietly in his sleep from a cardiac arrhythmia that was not anticipated, not planned for, unexpected,' Habian said.
Habian admitted only only one error by New York Hopital staff -- no one added up Warol's liquid output as noted on worksheets that later were discarded. Habian maintained, however, that the sheets were not relevant to his death.
'We had apparently a dopey clerk,' said the lawyer.
But he said it was impossible for anyone to resuscitate Warhol, and in defense of the team of doctors and nurses who responded to an alert from Warhol's private duty nurse, Habian said evidence would show their efforts were too late.
'We were attempting to revive a corpse,' he said.
Estate lawyer Bruce Clark concluded his opening arguments early in the day without saying how much money the jury should award Warhol's brothers.
He said the New York-based artist was close to his family and planned to provide for his brothers in their retirement but did not have a chance to revise his will that left them each $250,000.
Clark noted the Internal Revnue Service estimated the Warhol estate was worth between $100 million and $200 million.
