Vortex Port Lawsuit Filed After Port Catheter Removed Due to Infection, Blood Clots

Lawsuit claims surgical removal of a Vortex port from the plaintiff’s neck left her with substantial physical deformity.

A Washington woman’s Vortex port lawsuit indicates she developed a dangerous blood clot in her neck, which became infected after her port catheter failed.

The complaint (PDF) was filed by Sadarah Rhone in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California on April 2. It names AngioDynamics Inc. and Navilyst Medical Inc. as the defendants.

AngioDynamics is the manufacturer of a line of port catheters, including the Vortex port, SmartPort and Xcela, which are often implanted in patients undergoing chemotherapy. The devices are designed to give doctors long-term access to a patient’s bloodstream without the need for repeated needle sticks. 

Port catheters, also known as totally implantable vascular access devices (TIVADs), consist of a small injection port placed beneath the skin and a flexible catheter which delivers the medication directly into a vein.

Over the past several years, a growing number of patients and doctors have reported problems with the Vortex port and similar devices. These reports include problems with infections, device migration and implant failure, which has led to hundreds of AngioDynamics port catheter lawsuits filed in courts nationwide and thousands of Bard PowerPort lawsuits brought against its competitor, C.R. Bard.

Rhone’s lawsuit raises similar allegations as those filed previously, indicating that the port catheters are defectively designed and manufactured, making patients susceptible to injuries from catheter fractures, migration, infections and premature failure.

Vortex Port Lawsuit

The complaint indicates Rhone received her Vortex port implant on January 5, 2017. However, the device barely lasted an entire month.

By February 11, Rhone had become concerned and went to see her doctor about the port. She was diagnosed as having developed an infection as well as blood clots in the right jugular of her neck. The device had to be immediately removed.

According to the lawsuit, Rhone suffered permanent injuries and significant physical deformity, along with financial losses, including medical expenses.

Rhone argues that AngioDynamics knew of the problem for years yet failed to warn doctors or patients about the risks of infections and failures, choosing to conceal reports of problems instead of correcting them, in order to sustain substantial profit margins.

“Defendants provided incomplete, insufficient, and misleading information to physicians in order to increase the number of physicians using the Vortex for the purpose of increasing their sales. By so doing, Defendants caused the dissemination of inadequate and misleading information to patients, including the Plaintiff.”

– Sadarah Rhone v. AngioDynamics Inc. et al

Due to the manufacturers’ efforts to conceal the issue, Rhone did not learn until very recently that a defective Vortex port design itself may have been the problem, she states. Her lawsuit presents claims of negligence, failure to warn, design defect, breach of warranty, fraudulent concealment, and violation of Washington state’s Consumer Protection Act. She seeks both compensatory and punitive damages.

AngioDynamics Port Catheter Lawsuits

Along with more than 300 similar port catheter lawsuits, Rhone’s complaint will be consolidated into a multidistrict litigation (MDL) in the Southern District of California, where the cases are undergoing coordinated discovery and pretrial proceedings before U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta.

Judge Ohta has called on the parties to select nine AngioDynamics port catheter lawsuits each by June 5, 2026, for a total of 18 to be prepared for early test trials. These “bellwether” trials are designed to see how juries respond to evidence and testimony that is nearly identical throughout the other claims.

While the results of these bellwether trials are not binding on other claims, they will be closely watched for how juries rule and the types of payouts awarded. These outcomes could influence negotiations toward an AngioDynamics port catheter lawsuit settlement.

If no settlement or resolution is reached, the judge is expected to begin remanding cases back to their original districts for individual trial dates.

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