Family Recovers $25.24 Million After an Unlicensed Resident Missed a Teen's Bowel Volvulus

In March 1996, the Hegartys' teenage daughter, about 15 years old, arrived at Children's Hospital in Milwaukee with severe abdominal pain. The physician who managed her overnight was Dr. Angela Beauchaine, a first-year medical resident who was not yet licensed to practice medicine. Her working diagnosis was constipation. It was wrong.

The girl actually had a small bowel volvulus, a twisting of the intestine that chokes off its own blood supply. For roughly 11 hours after she was admitted, no licensed physician examined her, and no one called a senior resident for a consultation. By early the next morning her abdomen was distended, rigid, and tender. When she finally reached the operating room that afternoon, the small bowel had already died from lack of blood and had to be removed.

The removal was only the start. Over the next two years the teenager went through 89 surgical procedures, including two organ transplants. She died on March 16, 1998, at the age of 17. Her medical bills exceeded $3.2 million.

Cannon & Dunphy tried the case in Milwaukee County Circuit Court for the girl's estate and her parents. William M. Cannon and Edward E. Robinson argued that the hospital system left a critically ill child in the hands of a resident who could not lawfully practice on her own and who never escalated the case during the hours that decided the outcome. After a three-week trial, on October 21, 2004, the jury returned a verdict of roughly $17.4 million. That figure included $7 million for the estate's pain and suffering and $3.5 million to each parent for the loss of their daughter's companionship before her death.

The defense then moved to shrink the award under Wisconsin's cap on noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases. The Court of Appeals turned that argument down in 2006. It held that the statutory cap did not reach a first-year resident who was not yet licensed, and that no cap limited the parents' recovery for the loss of their child's society before she died. The award survived intact. Judgment was entered for roughly $19 million, and once the settlement with the remaining defendants was added in, the family's total recovery came to $25.24 million.