Indiana Jury Awards Neurosurgeon $16.95 Million After Career-Ending Fall on a Hospital Pantry Floor

On the morning of November 19, 1998, Dr. Gregory Loomis was checking on his patients in the east wing of the fourth floor at St. Mary's Medical Center in Evansville, Indiana, where he held privileges as a neurosurgeon. He stopped in the fourth-floor pantry to pour himself a cup of coffee. The pot was sitting full of water near the sink, so he walked over, picked it up with his left hand, turned back toward the coffee maker, took a step, and slipped, falling backward onto his left side.

The fall sent a sharp pain through his left elbow that he would later call the worst of his life. Over the following weeks his physician diagnosed reflex sympathetic dystrophy, a condition in which the body's response to an injury never shuts off. The pain became constant. It disrupted his sleep, and it took away the steady hands his work required. Loomis, who had been earning roughly $1.2 million a year and performing around 250 procedures annually, could no longer operate. He left surgical practice and went on to work as a medico-legal expert for a fraction of his former income.

Loomis sued the hospital for negligence, and Gregory J. Bubalo of Becker Law Office took the case to trial with Evansville co-counsel Gregory Meyer. The plaintiff's safety expert faulted St. Mary's for not placing non-slip mats in the pantry, a room that physicians and staff used for coffee throughout the day, and testified that mats would have substantially reduced the hazard of slipping. Nine nurses testified that they had regularly seen water or ice on the pantry floor, and the jury heard that nurses who had slipped there themselves never reported it.

St. Mary's denied responsibility. Its lawyers argued that Loomis simply was not watching where he was going, and a nurse who had been in the pantry shortly before the fall testified that she saw no water or ice on the floor. The hospital's own witnesses testified that no one had ever fallen in the pantry before and that the room had a slip-resistant floor that was cleaned daily. It also argued that his disability traced to a pre-existing tennis elbow condition he had undergone surgery for that September, not to the slip.

The case was tried over six days before Judge Wayne S. Trockman in Vanderburgh Superior Court. After roughly five hours of deliberation, the jury assigned 100 percent of the fault to the hospital and none to Loomis. It awarded him $16,950,000 for lost income, pain and suffering, and medical expenses, and the court entered judgment in that amount on July 31, 2001.

St. Mary's appealed, arguing the award was excessive. On December 17, 2002, the Indiana Court of Appeals affirmed, holding that the trial court had not abused its discretion and that the damages were not excessive. The judgment of $16,950,000 stood.