Posted on January 01, 2017 in Medical Malpractice

Article posted on: 07/10/2008

A $1.25 million jury award was handed down in a Tennessee medical malpractice / medical negligence / medical error case involving the failure of several health care providers to check a 34 year old dialysis patient’s potassium levels prior to discharge from an emergency room. The patient suffered from end-stage renal disease requiring dialysis. A day after he missed a dialysis session due to a hospital emergency room visit, the patient’s mother called the patient’s treating nephrologist and inquired whether it would be necessary to make up the missed session and whether the patient need to have his potassium level checked. The nephrologist told the patient’s mother that the patient could wait until the next day. He died that evening following a heart stoppage resulting from hyperkalemia – excessive potassium in the blood. The patient’s mother sued the nephrologist, an emergency room physician, the hospital, a nurse and unknown hospital employee, alleging they failed to communicate with with each other negligently allowed the patient to leave the hospital without checking his potassium level after the missed dialysis session. In fact, it was discovered that a proper blood test had been ordered in the emergency room, but that an unknown hospital employee had cancelled it.

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 Posted on January 01, 2017 in Medical Malpractice

Article posted on: 07/09/2008

Recently, in Ohio, the family of a 38 year old woman who died of a pulmonary embolus shortly after being admitted to the hospital, settled a wrongful death lawsuit against the doctor for 5.85 million dollars. The decedent had suffered from leg pain and shortness of breath for several days. She consulted an internist who admitted her to the hospital. Several hours later, the doctor ordered various tests to rule out or diagnose hypercoagulability. These results were extremely elevated. Shortly thereafter, the woman was found unresponsive in her hospital bed. An autopsy revealed the cause of death to be a pulmonary embolism. The estate of the woman sued the internist, alleging a failure to timely treat the pulmonary embolism, arguing that the doctor should have immediately ordered a STAT chest CT scan, ordered an ultrasound following admission and initiated heparain therapy. The defendants argued that the heparin would not have prevented the death because the clot was old and would not have been dissolved by the drug. After testimony from the experts, the parties reached settlement in the amount stated above.

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 Posted on January 01, 2017 in Medical Malpractice

Article posted on: 07/09/2008

Recently, the family of a 39 year old Michigan construction worker who worked as a ditch digger and pipe layer received a 9 million dollar jury award in a medical malpractice/negligence lawsuit following the man’s death from a fungal infection. The man, who took medicine for rheumatoid arthritis (which resulted in a compromised immune system) began suffering from a fever of unknown origin. After 10 days, he was admitted to a hospital under the care of two internal medicine doctors and an infectious disease specialist. For nine days, he underwent tests, including a general fungal test. He subsequently became critically ill and died. The cause of death was ultimately determined to be disseminated histoplasmosis, a fungal infection contracted from the soil. Because of the man’s daily contact with the soil, the family argued that the defendant doctors should have performed a biopsy or urine test to timely rule out histoplasmosis while he was hospitalized. At the conclusion of the trial, the jury found the health care providers negligent awarded the family $9 million dollars.

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 Posted on January 01, 2017 in Medical Malpractice

Article posted on: 06/23/2008

As initially reported in the Cincinnati Enquirer, an Ohio woman whose baby was stuck in her birth canal for 13½ hours won $22.6 million last month in a medical malpractice lawsuit. A Hamilton County jury – which heard five weeks of testimony and deliberated for 3½ days – found physician and her practice group negligent in the case. Jurors also found that the doctor and her group knew or should have known their actions would have resulted in brain injuries during the Sept. 4, 1997, birth of the woman’s child. According to the Plaintiff’s attorney, the evidence was very compelling that this baby was not going to fit through the birth canal due to her size of over nine pounds. In addition, the mother was known to have a narrow pelvic arch. In addition to being a big baby in a small canal, the baby’s injuries also were allegedly caused because medical workers continued to give the mother drugs to make the uterus contract, hoping to expel the baby. The result was a uterus contracting on the baby’s stuck head, causing brain damage. Ultimately, the baby was delivered by Caesarian section. Now 11, the baby is a spastic quadriplegic. The baby suffered brain damage that will affect her for life because her head was squeezed for so long. She can walk short distances but needs a walker. She can see but because the part of her brain that processes vision was damaged, her brain can’t properly interpret what her eyes see. She has problems using her hands, and she is mildly retarded. She also suffers from signs and symptoms consistent with cerebral palsy.

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 Posted on January 01, 2017 in Medical Malpractice

Article posted on: 06/23/2008

At Silverman Thompson, we are well known in the Baltimore-Washington area for successfully handling many medical malpractice (medical negligence) cases. Our lawyers routinely return verdicts for our clients that are among the highest in the state of Maryland. These verdicts regularly exceed a million dollars and more often than not are in the multi-million dollar range. Our lawyers handle these cases typically on a contingent fee basis, meaning we lay out the expenses in advance and our clients are only responsible for repaying those expenses and the attorneys’ fees if we are successful for them by way of settlement, trial or on appeal.

While the care is generally good at area hospitals, and in this region of the country in general, patients and their loved ones need to watch out for themselves or loved ones when they are treated at or admitted to these hospitals. Unfortunately, our office has handled medical malpractice / negligence cases against almost every hospital in the Baltimore-Washington area, including Johns Hopkins Hospital, Johns Hopkins Bayview, University of Maryland Medical Center, Maryland General Hospital, Harbor Hospital, Mercy Medical Center, Sinai Hospital, Northwest Hospital, Greater Baltimore Medical Center (GBMC), Franklin Square Hospital, Howard County General Hospital, Anne Arundel Medial Center, Baltimore Washington Medical Center, Upper Chesapeake Medical Center, Harford Memorial Hospital, Frederick Memorial Hospital, Washington Adventist Hospital, and Shady Grove Adventist Hospital. Again, while the care at these hospitals is generally good, there continue to be instances of substantial medical negligence that result in patients being severely and permanently injured. In rarer cases, the medical negligence tragically leads to the death of a patient. As a result, our office recommends that each time you or a loved one is treated at a hospital, you establish a relationship with the doctors and nurses who will be caring for you or the loved one, ask as many questions as you feel are necessary and be present as much as possible to oversee what is going on. It is only through an open dialogue with these health care providers that you will receive the necessary information to make informed decisions about your or your loved ones’ health.

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 Posted on January 01, 2017 in Medical Malpractice

Article posted on: 06/03/2008

As first reported in the Tuscon Citizen last month, a jury awarded a Tucson family $6 million in a lawsuit brought after an ailing 81-year-old relative died of a morphine overdose. According to the article, Mary Culpepper and two other relatives last month were awarded $2 million each, with the cost to be paid 90 percent by operators of a nursing home, Manor Care Health Services, and 10 percent to be paid by Tucson Medical Center. Culpepper sued Manor Care, TMC, a doctor, nurse and pharmacy over the Dec. 8, 2003, death of her mother, Sylvia Culpepper. She was admitted to TMC on Dec. 2, 2003, suffering from sciatica, a painful nerve condition. On Dec. 4, 2003, she was prescribed 15 milligrams of morphine twice a day. Two days later, her dosage increased to 30 milligrams, twice a day. When Culpepper was transferred from TMC to Manor Care, prescription orders contained both dosages. According to the lawsuit, the Manor Care staff failed to note the discrepancy in the prescriptions and gave her both dosages, both twice a day. An autopsy determined that Culpepper died of acute morphine intoxication.

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 Posted on January 01, 2017 in Medical Malpractice

As first reported in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last month, a Superior Court judge struck down the cap on damage awards in medical malpractice cases as unconsitutional. If upheld on appeal, this holding could undercut a major component of Georgia’s tort reform laws. Superior Court Judge Marvin Arrington wrote in an order that the legislative cap of $350,000 for noneconomic damages such as pain and suffering was unconstitutional because it gave special protections to the medical profession. This meant people injured by doctors had less protection than those injured by, say, a manufacturer’s product. The legislature approved the $350,000 cap in 2005 as part of a civil-justice tort reform law over the opposition of the Georgia Trial Lawyers Association and consumer groups. Doctors and hospitals said the law was needed to hold down malpractice-insurance premiums. In reaction to Arrington’s ruling, the Medical Association of Georgia said tort reform had made doctors’ services, such as obstetrical and general surgery, more accessible because of reduced insurance premiums. In 2006, the Georgia Supreme Court stuck down another provision of tort reform when it ruled that defendants couldn’t decide in which county their medical-malpractice case was tried. When the malpractice cap was enacted, trial lawyers complained its real effect was to reduce the incentive for doctors, hospitals and insurers to negotiate substantial settlements because they wouldn’t face the threat of large verdicts for pain and suffering and other noneconomic damages, which are the most subjective part of jury awards. As set forth in the opinion, Arrington opined that “the statute effectively puts substantial limitations on the rights of the poor and middle class to recovery while leaving the right to virtually unlimited recoveries unimpeded for the wealthy.”

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 Posted on January 01, 2017 in Medical Malpractice

As reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer last month, an ongoing case in federal court in Newark, New Jersey highlights the hidden dangers of organ transplants in the United States, a little known and/or reported danger, but one that is reported in the medical literature. In 2005, Tony Grier, 43, was dying from a rare lung disease when he received two donor lungs from a 31 year old woman who died in a car accident. Grier died six months later after it was discovered that the transplanted lungs had lung cancer. Lawyers for Mr. Grier’s estate contend the hospital should have known the lungs were cancerous because the donor had smoked for 16 years. Defendants in the suit are the University of Pennsylvania Health System, the hospital and surgeons who performed the transplant and evaluated the lungs, and Lancaster General Hospital, where they were harvested. The suit alleges that the defendants failed to perform necessary tests that would have detected cancer, and also failed to find it after the transplant. According to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), a national nonprofit that was established by Congress in 1984 to administer the nation’s transplantation network, lung cancer in a transplanted organ is very rare. Data from the UNOS shows that cancer, of any kind, was transmitted to 47 organ recipients between 1994 and 2006. Lung transplant recipients accounted for eight of those cases. In short, despite all of the efforts being made by health care providers to secure a safe organ for transplantation, transmission of malignancy in a donor organ and/or other diseases, can happen. As a result, donor registries continue to seek to improve their abilities to obtain accurate medical information from donor patients while the organ donee facilities simultaneously seek more accessibility to personal data and information regarding the donating parties so as to avoid this possibility.

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 Posted on January 01, 2017 in Medical Malpractice

As was reported by the Associated Press, the birth of Susan Anne Catherine Torres, delivered by a brain-dead mother who was kept on life support to sustain the pregnancy, made medical history less than three years ago. A recently filed malpractice lawsuit is now raising legal questions about the degree to which a doctor’s obligations in treating a pregnant woman also extend to her unborn fetus. In the lawsuit, Jason Torres, the father of the Susan Anne and husband of the brain-dead mother, Susan Torres, seeks damages against the ER physician who treated his wife in 2005. The lawsuit holds the ER physician responsible not only for the mother’s death, but also the death of the baby, who died 5 weeks after delivery due to complications from a premature delivery.

In the lawsuit, Mr. Torres alleges that the ER doctor dismissed as “morning sickness” symptoms that indicated a more serious problem. Those symptoms included memory lapses–witnessed by a nurse–in which Susan Michelle Torres couldn’t recognize her husband when she was sitting next to him. The Complaint alleges that further tests would have revealed bleeding on the brain. After being discharged from the hospital, Ms. Torres fell into a coma from a brain hemorrhage caused by melanoma. At the time, she was about 14 weeks pregnant. Mr. Torres made the decision to keep his wife on life support, with the hope that the baby could develop to the point of viability. Doctors were able to keep the mother on life support for 3 months, long enough for the fetus to become viable. Delivery occurred 13 weeks prematurely. The next day the mother was taken off life support and died.

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 Posted on January 01, 2017 in Medical Malpractice

As was first reported in the Las Vegas Sun, a lawsuit was settled last month which claimed that a doctor missed a man’s cancer during a hastily performed colonoscopy. Kevin Rexford, a 46-year-old pharmacist, said the defendant, one of the clinic’s owners, missed an obvious colon cancer diagnosis three years ago. The alleged failure allowed the cancer to spread throughout his body and he now has only about a 10 percent chance of living five more years. Rexford is married with two young children, a fact that makes the failed diagnosis all the more difficult to reconcile. A source familiar with the case said the settlement was in the range of $2 million, the maximum amount of insurance carried by the doctor and his affiliated medical practice. Experts who were paid to review the case on Rexford’s behalf said the defendant only took only three minutes – half the minimum recommended time – to examine Rexford’s colon for cancer during a Jan. 28, 2005, procedure. His missed diagnosis allowed the cancer to progress to an incurable stage, the experts said.

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