$2 Million Verdict for Wrist Screw Left Grinding Away Cartilage
After trial: Affirmed in full. The Maine Law Court rejected the defendants' challenges to the damages and a jury instruction in 2019 (2019 ME 38).
Won by Berman & Simmons.
A hand surgeon put a compression screw into Robbie Nason's fractured wrist, then read several imaging studies over months without noticing the screw was protruding and grinding into cartilage. A second surgeon spotted it on sight. Nason lost the bone entirely, and the Law Court affirmed his $2 million verdict in full.
What happened
In July 2013 Robbie M. Nason of Greenbush, then in his mid-forties, fractured the scaphoid bone in his right wrist when a kayak fell on him. In September 2013 Dr. Timothy Pruchnic, a hand surgeon employed by Eastern Maine Medical Center, implanted a compression screw to hold the bone together.
The screw was protruding out of the scaphoid and grinding into the surrounding cartilage.
Over the following months Nason kept coming back. He reported pain and a distinct clicking in the wrist. Pruchnic ordered several imaging studies and read none of them as showing a problem, and cleared him for physical therapy. The protruding screw was eventually identified not by Pruchnic but by a second surgeon, brought in by Nason's workers' compensation carrier, who saw it on sight.
By then the damage was done. That surgeon removed the screw and found extensive cartilage damage, operated a second time to clean up what could be cleaned up, and finally performed a third surgery removing the scaphoid bone altogether.
A nine-person jury in Penobscot County Superior Court heard four days of evidence before Justice Ann Murray and deliberated about two hours. On October 27, 2017 it returned $2,000,000, covering lost income, permanent disfigurement and permanent impairment.
The defendants appealed, arguing the damages were excessive and that the jury had been wrongly instructed on the workers' compensation payments Nason had already received. On March 12, 2019 the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, sitting as the Law Court, rejected both arguments and affirmed. Nothing was reduced.
Nason was represented by Jodi L. Nofsinger, who argued the appeal, and Taylor A. Asen, both then of Berman and Simmons in Lewiston.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Nason v. Pruchnic, 2019 ME 38 (Me. Mar. 12, 2019, revised Apr. 23, 2019), docket Pen-18-10·Archived copy
- 2.Bangor Daily News, Oct. 30, 2017: the jury awards a Maine man $2 million after the botched hand surgery·Archived copy
- 3.WAGM: a jury orders the Bangor hospital and the doctor to pay $2 million in the medical malpractice case·Archived copy
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