Sympathetic witness
Ms. O made an extremely sympathetic witness. She told the jury that the stress of her injuries had caused the demise of her marriage, and her life was filled with daily struggles. She couldn't even bathe herself anymore, much less take care of her children.
Her attorney showed videos of Ms. O struggling to manage day-to-day activities using her prosthetic limbs. The jury looked pained.
“I went in for treatment of a kidney stone, and I came out with no arms and legs! How could such a thing happen,” she demanded.
Over the course of the next several weeks, the plaintiff's attorney paraded a stream of expert witnesses. A urologist explained the symptoms of kidney stones and blockage for the jurors. Several emergency medicine physicians swore they would have recognized Ms. O's stone and treated it immediately.
A reasonable defense
The defense argued that the ED physicians had followed protocol to determine the source of Ms. O's pain and had done nothing wrong.
“Standard procedure is to send a patient for an ultrasound first,” Dr. F testified. “If that's inconclusive, we send the patient for a CT scan. That's what we were doing when she went into shock. At that point, our sole issue was to keep her alive — to save her life, to keep her heart beating. It's tragic that she lost her limbs, but we saved her life.”
The defense attorneys' experts testified that Dr. F and Dr. G had done what was appropriate under the circumstances and that Ms. O was already in crisis when she appeared in the ED.
“Had she come in earlier,” one of them opined, “perhaps when she first started feeling the pain, rather than waiting until the middle of the night, the problem could have been diagnosed before she went into shock.”
Ultimately, the jury agreed. It found that, although Ms. O's situation was unfortunate, the hospital and its physicians had saved Ms. O's life by acting appropriately under the circumstances and that no malpractice had occurred.
Ms. Latner, a former criminal defense attorney, is a freelance medical writer in Port Washington, N.Y.