A trial court in Michigan awarded $20 million in damages to the family of a woman who died after she underwent an invasive brain surgery she did not need; hospital staff confused her records with those of a patient suffering from an intracranial hemorrhage. It was an enormous award for an unambiguous error on the hospital’s part. Six years after the patient’s death, the family has yet to receive the money to which the court declared they were entitled. This is because the lawyer who represented the plaintiffs chose to argue the case as one of ordinary negligence, instead of medical malpractice.
In 2012, the patient, an 81-year-old woman, sought treatment for a dislocated jaw. The surgery required to correct the injury is a simple one, so simple, in fact, that it is sometimes performed in the same outpatient clinics by the same oral surgeons who remove wisdom teeth. Instead, as a result of an error at the hospital where she sought treatment, the patient’s medical records were switched with those of a patient who required immediate surgery to treat intracranial bleeding.
The patient underwent a risky and invasive surgery, in which five holes were drilled in her skull, and part of the skull was removed. Once the surgeons could see the patient’s brain, they realized that she was not the person suffering from the intracranial hemorrhage, and they put her skull back together. She never regained consciousness after the surgery and died two months later.
The patient’s estate filed a lawsuit against the hospital, claiming negligence. The attorney representing the plaintiffs was a recognizable name in the legal profession due to his role in other controversial cases involving physicians. He chose to pursue a negligence claim because these types of claims do not have damages caps in Michigan, whereas the cap for damages awarded in medical malpractice cases is $800,000.
The trial court ruled that the hospital was at fault. A case like this easily results in a verdict in favor of the plaintiff, whether it is pursued as medical malpractice or simply as negligence. The hospital falsified the patient’s records and lied to the patient’s family, the adult members of which had limited proficiency in the English language.
Two years after the original lawsuit was filed, the hospital admitted that it was at fault. By this time, the plaintiffs had re-filed the lawsuit as a medical malpractice suit. Despite this, the attorney for the plaintiffs continued to treat it as an ordinary negligence lawsuit, leading the trial court to award the plaintiffs $20 million in damages. The court calculated the damages as follows:
- $300,000 for medical expenses and funeral expenses (the patient was cremated, and her family traveled to India, their country of origin, to scatter her ashes in the Ganges River)
- $13 million for the patient’s pain and suffering
- $4.5 million for the family’s damages up to the time of the verdict
- $2.2 million for the family’s future damages
- $1 million dollars in expenses related to the legal process
The defendant appealed the ruling, and an appeals court overturned it. The court reasoned that the attorney for the plaintiff had insisted on pursuing the claim as a negligence claim, despite the first judge’s orders that the matter could only be tried as a medical malpractice case. Eventually, the case was heard before the Michigan Supreme Court, which ruled that it was a matter of medical and legal dereliction. In its judgment, the Supreme Court stated that, because of the lawyer’s actions, the plaintiffs now had no medical malpractice claim and no negligence claim. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court admitted that the defendant in the original lawsuit had admitted wrongdoing, and a jury had determined that the defendant’s negligence was the cause of the patient’s death and awarded damages accordingly. The patient’s husband wondered aloud how such an outcome was “possible in a just and fair world.”
In such a clear case of wrongdoing on the part of the hospital, it stands to reason that the plaintiffs are still entitled to seek damages. They could hire a different lawyer and petition the court for a different ruling. They could also file a legal malpractice lawsuit against the attorney whose risky legal maneuvers cost them an enormous award in a case where the facts were apparently clear-cut. The attorney who represented the plaintiffs has previously been named as a defendant in at least one legal malpractice case. The previous legal malpractice case involved a person who was electrocuted at a government-owned marina. The lawyer pursued the case under Michigan state law, but the defendants won the case by claiming government immunity. The clients claimed that they would have won the case if the lawyer had invoked admiralty laws, since the accident took place in navigable waters.
In a case like this one, where doctors operated on the wrong patient, it was easy for medical expert witnesses to show that the hospital was at fault. The expert witnesses helped the case lead to one of the largest awards of damages in Michigan history.
Sources
https://www.enjuris.com/blog/news/brain-surgery-mistake/
http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/estate_recovers_nothing_for_mistaken_brain_surgery_because_lawyers_used_est
