Dallas Jury Awards $10.1 Million After Hospital Delay Left Woman Paralyzed

In March 2019, Judy 'Jessie' Adams went to a North Texas pain management clinic for an epidural steroid injection to treat chronic back pain. She got the shot around 2:30 p.m. Forty-five minutes later, while she was still being observed at the office, she began losing feeling in her legs. The symptoms did not let up, and it was 4:30 p.m. before the doctor called an ambulance to take her to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Flower Mound.

Adams reached the emergency room by 5 p.m. The physicians who assessed her suspected an epidural hemorrhage, bleeding around the spine that can cause paralysis but often leaves patients some use of their legs if it is relieved quickly. They ordered an emergency MRI at 5:04 p.m., and the machine was open by 5:15 p.m. Nobody took Adams up for the scan. At 5:41 p.m. the MRI technologist clocked out. At that point Adams could still move her legs and walk to the restroom on her own. She finally got the scan at 6:31 p.m., and four minutes later a technologist recognized the hemorrhage.

A plan for immediate surgery was in place by 7:30 p.m., but much of the on-call surgical team had gone home for the day and had to be called back in. The operation to relieve the bleeding did not begin until 10 p.m., about seven and a half hours after the injection.

At trial in Dallas County's 68th Judicial District Court, Dallas neurosurgeon Martin Lazar testified that patients in Adams's condition have to be in surgery within six hours to have any hope of appreciable improvement, and that she would have kept roughly 50 percent more motor strength had she reached the operating room inside that window. The hospital's defense argued that Dr. Jon Vu, the physician who gave the injection and who settled with the Adamses before trial, was responsible for how long it took to get her to the emergency room at all. Adams's lawyers, Michael Lyons, Christopher Carr, Michael Fechner and Stephen Higdon of Lyons & Simmons, argued the hospital had broken its own policies on communication between the emergency department and radiology, including one requiring a surgical team to be at the hospital within an hour of being called.

On December 9, 2022, after about eight hours of deliberation, the jury found the hospital willfully and wantonly negligent, the standard Texas law requires before a hospital can be held liable for emergency care. Jurors put 69 percent of the fault on the hospital, 30 percent on Dr. Vu and 1 percent on his practice, Pain & Spine Physicians. The verdict came to $10,125,000, reported as roughly $4.5 million in economic damages for medical bills, household services and lost earning capacity and roughly $5.6 million in non-economic damages for physical pain, mental anguish, disfigurement, physical impairment and Richard Adams's loss of his wife's companionship. Texas's statutory cap on non-economic damages in health care liability claims limited that side of the award to $500,000, leaving a collectible judgment of roughly $5 million.

The trial judge signed the judgment on May 1, 2023, and the hospital appealed to the Fifth District Court of Appeals in Dallas. Its own motion in that court says the parties reached a full and final settlement on May 31, 2023, then asked the appeals court to hold the case while they funded it. Once the settlement was funded, the hospital moved without opposition to dismiss its own appeal, and the court granted that on July 11, 2023. The settlement terms are confidential, so the amount Adams collected is not public. She lives with permanent paralysis of her legs.