Rhode Island Malpractice Judgment Over a Missed Brain Tumor, Cut Back on Appeal

From 2012 to 2019, Lucia Urizar-Mota repeatedly went to Providence Community Health Center with headaches that lasted for weeks at a time and changed in pattern, along with nausea and vomiting. Across nine visits between November 14, 2012 and June 19, 2019, a nurse practitioner and two physicians diagnosed her with migraines and prescribed Tylenol and migraine medication. None of them ordered a CT scan or an MRI, and none referred her to a neurologist.

On June 19, 2019, Urizar-Mota went to the clinic's express appointment because the headaches had gotten so bad, and she lost consciousness in the parking lot. She was thirty-two. An ambulance took her to Rhode Island Hospital, where a brain scan showed an abnormal buildup of cerebral fluid and a mass in the fourth ventricle of her brain. Five days later she had surgery to remove a pilocytic astrocytoma, a slow-growing grade 1 tumor that normally leaves ninety percent of patients with no permanent injury. During the operation she suffered strokes in her cerebellum. She spent six months in a hospital and a rehabilitation center. She still has tremors in her left hand, arm and leg, uncoordinated eye movements that blur her vision, and balance problems that keep her from walking without a mobility aid, and she cannot drive, cook, clean, or care for her four children the way she did before.

Because Providence Community Health Center is a federally qualified health center whose clinicians are treated as federal employees, the family's claim ran against the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act rather than against the doctors or the clinic. Amato A. DeLuca and Katelyn M. Revens filed the complaint in April 2021, signing it for DeLuca & Associates, Ltd. By the time of the appeal their firm was DeLuca, Weizenbaum, Barry & Revens, Ltd. The case went to a bench trial before Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island.

McConnell found that the nurse practitioner's record-keeping about Urizar-Mota's symptoms fell short of the standard of care, and that one of the physicians diagnosed migraines without the information needed to support that diagnosis. Treated within the standard of care, he found, she would have had a CT scan showing the tumor, and surgery would have come sooner, carried less risk and done less damage.

In his December 9, 2024 decision, McConnell valued her post-diagnosis medical expenses at $662,194.62, her pre-diagnosis pain and suffering at $240,800 (calculated at $100 a day), her post-diagnosis pain and suffering at $6,387,500 ($350 a day over an estimated fifty-year remaining life expectancy), and the homemaking work she can no longer do at $2,920,000 ($20 an hour, eight hours a day, seven days a week, over the same fifty years). The award section of the decision entered judgment of $8,385,494.62 for Urizar-Mota, plus $3,500,000 for her four children for the loss of their mother's care and companionship: $1,250,000 to her eldest daughter, who took on the household duties, and $750,000 to each of the three younger children. The judgment came to $11,885,494.62. Because the Federal Tort Claims Act bars punitive damages and prejudgment interest against the government, and Rhode Island caps neither medical malpractice damages nor non-economic damages, nothing was trimmed by statute at that stage.

The government appealed to the First Circuit. On March 27, 2026, a panel of Judges Gelpi, Thompson and Dunlap upheld the findings on breach and causation and both pain-and-suffering awards, and modified the medical expense award to $658,594.62 by deducting $3,600 for a spinal MRI the record did not tie to the malpractice.

The panel then reversed the full $3,500,000 in loss-of-consortium damages. Urizar-Mota's administrative claim form named only her, neither her husband nor her children filed their own, and the panel held that the children's claims were never presented to the federal agency as the Federal Tort Claims Act requires, so the district court had no jurisdiction to award them anything. The panel also vacated the $2,920,000 homemaker award, finding the per-diem method unsupported by the evidence and grossly excessive under Rhode Island's homemaker-damages statute, and sent that piece back to the district court to be recalculated. What stands confirmed is $7,286,894.62: her medical expenses as modified, plus both pain-and-suffering awards.