INDIANAPOLIS — You’d likely not guess it by looking at him now, but Levi Harrison was once a very, large man.
“I was three-hundred pounds. I got down to a hundred and forty pounds,” said Harrison.
He got there with gastric bypass surgery and the weight came off, but it led to a new problem. All over his body there were folds of extra skin.
Harrison said, “I didn’t feel comfortable in my skin because I was all just skin. I looked better when I was bigger. I filled it out.”
To address that problem, Harrison turned to a surgeon who successfully rebuilt his abdominal cavity after his gastric bypass: Dr. Scott Mimms.
In January, Mimms’ license to practice medicine in Indiana was suspended for 90-days.
At the end of an hours long hearing, the Medical Licensing Board homed in on two things Mimms did routinely: performed surgeries in his office which was not certified and attended to anesthesia while also doing the surgery.
The latter issue prompted one member of the Medical Licensing Board to tell Mimms,
“You just can’t do it and it’s not safe.”
Harrison was one of Mimms original cosmetic surgery patients. After working for Community North and Franciscan Health as a general surgeon, Mimms transitioned to private practice focusing on cosmetic procedures.
In 2017, Harrison had a series of surgeries done by Mimms. It started with a 2017 operation to remove excess skin from Harrison’s legs. That procedure featured the two things that Mimms years later would be chastised for by state officials, the operation was done in his office and the anesthesia was overseen by Mimms. It appears the anesthesia was also unconventional.
Harrison says it was, “a bottle of Vicodin he wrote the script for like two-days before.”
During the procedure Harrison says he was never unconscious, although there were pauses in the surgery.
“Every time the Vicodin wore off, we’d stop until I could take more Vicodin and wait for the painkiller to kick in,” said Harrison.
FOX59/CBS4 has also reviewed the nine malpractice complaints filed against Mimms since the start of this year.
In each case, Mimms performed a surgery in his office while attending to anesthesia during the procedure.
When it was explained to Harrison about the parallels of the recent complaints to his experiences with Mimms, he said, “I’m not surprised, and I feel for every one of them. I’m not saying (Mimms is) a bad guy but he shoulda stuck with what he was good at, and it wasn’t cosmetic.”
FOX59/CBS4 contacted Mimms’ attorney, David Jose for comment.
Jose said his client “was not performing procedures in a dangerous manner.”
On Thursday, Mimms’ medical license suspension was extended by 90 days.
