$2.1 Million Verdict Over Positive Blood Culture That Never Reached Doctor
After trial: Reduced by comparative fault. The jury returned $2,100,000 and reduced it by $315,000 for John Pierce's own share of fault, so $1,785,000 was entered.
Won by Berman & Simmons.
John Pierce was sent home from a Bangor emergency department before his blood cultures came back. They were positive for a bacterium that signals a potentially fatal heart-valve infection. The result never reached his primary care physician, the infection ran untreated for eight months, and it destroyed his heart valves.
What happened
On May 31, 2010 John Pierce, a retired Millinocket mill worker then 66 years old, went to the emergency department at St. Joseph Hospital in Bangor with recurring fevers, shortness of breath and weakness. A physician assistant ordered blood cultures, which is the right call. Pierce was then sent home before the results came back, told to follow up with his primary care physician, Dr. Edward Dunstan, in Millinocket.
The cultures came back positive for viridans streptococci. That organism in the blood is a signal for infective endocarditis, an infection of the heart valves that kills people if it is not treated.
Nobody at the hospital passed that result to Dunstan. Dunstan never asked for it. Pierce kept coming back complaining, and the result sat where it was.
The infection ran untreated for eight months and destroyed his heart valves. He was eventually diagnosed with infective endocarditis and needed emergency open-heart surgery to replace them.
The case was tried in Penobscot County Superior Court at the Penobscot Judicial Center in Bangor before Justice William Anderson, beginning January 19, 2016. The hospital's own lawyer told the jury, "We did make a mistake," while arguing that the doctor and the patient shared the blame for what came after.
On January 26, 2016 the jury returned $2,100,000, itemized as $600,000 in medical expenses, $500,000 for pain and suffering and $1,000,000 for permanent injury. It then attributed a share of fault to Pierce himself and took $315,000 off, leaving $1,785,000.
John and Clara Pierce were represented by Berman and Simmons.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Berman & Simmons
All Berman & Simmons proven verdicts →A federal jury in Pennsylvania awarded $25 million to Travis Sweigart after a tractor-trailer driver turned left across his path at the exit of Interstate 176, crushing Sweigart's pelvis and leaving him with injuries the treating surgeon described as unquestionably the worst pelvic fracture he had ever seen.
A jury awarded Robert Giordano $23.1 million after a Northern Light radiologist failed to report a large bony mass compressing his spinal cord, leaving him permanently paralyzed from the chest down.
A Vermont jury awarded $22.5 million, the second-largest verdict in state history at the time, to a Maine utility lineman who lost both legs below the knee after an ungrounded, defectively installed air-break switch at a Richford substation released a 5,000-degree electrical arc through his body.
Emily Mitchell went to Inland Hospital in Waterville for laparoscopic surgery to remove a benign cyst on her left ovary. The surgeon removed her bladder instead, and pathology on the excised tissue found bladder wall and no ovarian tissue at all. She now lives with a bladder rebuilt from her small intestine. A jury awarded her $15.75 million and her husband $1.25 million.
Related medical malpractice verdicts
A Utah judge entered a $951 million default judgment against Steward Health Care after newly trained nurses, an excessive Pitocin drip, and a delayed C-section at Jordan Valley Medical Center left a newborn permanently brain damaged.
A Gainesville jury awarded $900 million, including $700 million in punitive damages, to stroke survivor Joseph Webb over neglect at the University Place Care and Rehabilitation Center, in a Wilkes & McHugh case tried against defaulted Trans Healthcare entities with no defense present, but Florida's First District Court of Appeal reversed the judgment in 2013 because the trial court had refused to let a defense lawyer appear, and the money was never collected; the estate's claim was later resolved for a small share of a multi-estate bankruptcy settlement.
A Clark County jury ordered Health Plan of Nevada and Sierra Health Services to pay $524 million after finding the UnitedHealth Group subsidiaries negligently credentialed a gastroenterologist whose unsafe injection practices at his Las Vegas endoscopy clinics caused the largest medically caused hepatitis C outbreak in American history.
Georgia Hayes, a Kansas City area ovarian cancer patient, sued pharmacist Robert Courtney after learning he had diluted the chemotherapy drugs used in her treatment. A Jackson County jury found Courtney liable and awarded Hayes $225,571,439 in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages, the first of hundreds of similar suits against Courtney to reach trial. The trial judge later found the award excessive and cut it by remittitur to $330,071,439, and that reduced judgment stood. Hayes herself and the case reporter covering the verdict both said she was unlikely to ever collect a significant portion of it.