$8.125M Verdict After Radiologist Spent 80 Seconds on X-Ray Hiding Stage I Lung Cancer
Won by Levin & Perconti.
A Cook County jury awarded $8.125 million to the estate of Althea Wright after a radiologist spent roughly 80 seconds reviewing a chest X-ray that showed a visible mass in her left lung, missing a Stage I cancer that advanced to fatal Stage III over the next 14 months.
What happened
On August 9, 2013, Althea Wright, then 62, arrived at the emergency room of MetroSouth Medical Center in Blue Island, Illinois, with fatigue, shortness of breath, anemia, and a rapid heartbeat. An ER physician ordered a chest X-ray, among other tests. The radiologist on duty, Dr. Palmer J. Blakley, reviewed the film and documented no abnormality, despite what the plaintiff's attorneys would later show was a visible rounded density in Wright's left lung.
More than a year passed. In October 2014, Wright returned to an emergency room with dizziness and lightheadedness. A second chest X-ray was taken, and this time a radiologist flagged a possible abnormality in the same area. A CT scan and biopsy confirmed squamous cell lung cancer, now Stage III. At the time of the 2013 X-ray, the cancer had been Stage I and, per trial evidence, surgically curable.
Wright underwent four months of chemotherapy and radiation. She died on March 2, 2015, at age 64. Her family filed suit against the estate of Dr. Blakley, who had since died, and against Unimed Ltd., the diagnostic radiology practice tied to her work. During litigation, evidence surfaced that Dr. Blakley had spent approximately 80 seconds reviewing Wright's 2013 X-ray film. She later acknowledged, according to case records, that fatigue was the most likely explanation for the miss. The suit was brought under the Illinois Survival Act and Illinois Wrongful Death Act on behalf of Wright's estate and her children.
Levin and Perconti attorneys John Perconti, Michael Bonamarte, and Daniel Goldfaden tried the case. On December 18, 2019, the Cook County jury returned a verdict of $8.125 million. No appellate reduction of the verdict has been reported in public court records or trade press coverage.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Levin & Perconti
All Levin & Perconti proven verdicts →A Coles County jury awarded $40 million to a 19-year-old and her parents after finding that hospital staff at Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center delayed calling a physician during a placental abruption, causing preventable birth injuries including cerebral palsy.
A Cook County jury delivered Illinois's largest-ever nursing home verdict, $12.2 million, finding that chronic understaffing at Lakeview Rehabilitation and Nursing Center caused Shirley Adams to develop fatal pressure wounds during her stay.
Silver Cross Hospital paid $8 million on the first day of jury selection to resolve a wrongful death suit brought by the family of a 61-year-old woman who died within 26 hours of admission after hospital staff failed to treat a septic kidney infection that records showed was apparent within two hours of her arrival.
A Cook County jury found in July 2017 that Clare Oaks, a Bartlett nursing home, let an 85-year-old resident go 14 days without her prescribed Coumadin, and she suffered a stroke on March 30, 2011. She died four years later. The jury assessed $4,111,477.66 against the facility, and the Illinois Appellate Court affirmed the verdict in August 2019.
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.