$10 Million Settlement for Boy Brain-Damaged When Heart-Lung Machine Lines Were Reversed in Surgery
Won by Cannon & Dunphy S.C..
A 10-year-old boy was left with severe brain damage after the arterial and venous lines of a heart-lung machine were connected in reverse during open-heart surgery, and Cannon & Dunphy resolved the case for $10 million, reported as the first eight-figure personal injury settlement in Wisconsin history.
What happened
During open-heart surgery, a 10-year-old boy was placed on a heart-lung machine, the device that takes over the work of the heart and lungs so a surgeon can operate on a still heart. The machine drains blood from the body through a venous line, adds oxygen to it, and pumps it back into circulation through an arterial line. In this operation, those two lines were connected in reverse.
With the arterial and venous connections switched, blood did not move through the boy's body the way it was supposed to. The brain is the organ least able to survive a loss of oxygen-rich blood, even briefly. He came out of the operating room with severe brain damage that would not heal, a child who went in for a heart repair and left needing care for the rest of his life.
The family brought a medical malpractice claim through Cannon & Dunphy, the Milwaukee firm built by William "Bill" Cannon, who spent decades suing hospitals and physicians over preventable harm. The theory was simple to state and hard to defend: connecting the heart-lung lines in the correct direction is one of the most basic steps of the procedure, and reversing them fell far below the accepted standard of care. A heart-lung machine is run by a perfusionist and watched by the surgical team, and getting the inflow and outflow lines right is something the people in the room are trained to confirm.
The case did not reach a jury. It settled for $10 million. At the time, that figure was reported as the first eight-figure personal injury settlement in Wisconsin history. Because the matter resolved by agreement rather than by verdict, the amount was never exposed to an appeal or to a judge's power to cut down a jury award, so the full $10 million stood.
The case became one of the results most tied to Cannon's name, set alongside a separate run of Wisconsin firsts he collected over his career, including the state's first eight-figure jury verdict in a personal injury case. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Cannon won more verdicts and settlements of $10 million or more than any other lawyer in the state. He died in 2023 at the age of 75.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Cannon & Dunphy S.C.
All Cannon & Dunphy S.C. proven verdicts →A Walworth County jury found Waukesha Memorial Hospital liable after a nurse pushed air into a two-week-old premature infant's IV line during a blood transfusion, sending emboli to his brain and leaving him with permanent quadriplegia and no usable speech.
A Milwaukee jury verdict and a related settlement delivered $25.24 million to a family after an unlicensed first-year resident spent 11 hours treating their teenage daughter for constipation while a twisted bowel killed the tissue it fed.
An Ozaukee County jury awarded the estate of Judith Cisewski $15 million after a retaining wall at her Port Washington senior living campus collapsed and buried her under concrete blocks for roughly two hours; she died the following day.
The family of a three-year-old girl who died of E. coli traced to contaminated beef at a South Milwaukee Sizzler reached a $13.5 million settlement, among the largest food-borne-illness recoveries in the country.
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.