$2.5 Million Verdict for Woman Left With Brain Damage After Knee Replacement Infection

Patricia Marquardt went to Dr. James Schaffhausen at Twin Cities Orthopedics for a pre-operative exam on Jan. 5, 2012, and had a knee replacement on Jan. 31. During the operation the surgeon saw dark, cloudy fluid and dead tissue in the joint. He ordered tests for infection, including a Gram stain and cultures, and finished the operation after the Gram stain came back negative. Two days later he wrote discharge notes recording a knee replacement without complication.

The next day, while she was still in the hospital, one of the cultures showed a methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infection, known as MRSA. On an infectious disease doctor's advice she was started on six weeks of intravenous vancomycin and sent home to continue it. After several days of treatment Marquardt went into renal failure, which doctors linked to the drug, and the treatment was stopped. She then had seizures and repeated hospital stays, and an MRI suggested acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, an inflammation of the brain. Her knee components were removed on March 20 and a spacer put in their place, and a new component was implanted later.

The lasting effects included brain damage with vision changes, loss of depth perception, spatial deficits, confusion and short-term memory loss. At trial her lawyers said she could no longer read printed material, drive, cook or live on her own.

Douglas Schmidt and Stephanie Winter of Schmidt & Salita tried the case in Hennepin County for about a week and a half. Their theory was that the surgeon should not have gone on with the operation after seeing signs of infection, that the infection reached her bloodstream, and that she was sent home a week after surgery while still ill. They also pointed out that she had been prescribed oxycodone despite borderline kidney function, and that she was anemic and had needed blood transfusions. Richard Thomas, defending, said her injuries came from a toxic reaction to the antibiotic rather than from the surgery, that the correct diagnosis was posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome, and that blood work never showed the infection had spread beyond the knee.

After two days of deliberation, the jury awarded $2.5 million. It assigned 80 percent of the fault to the orthopedic surgeon and the remaining 20 percent to the infectious disease doctors.

The verdict then went through appeal. In May 2019 a divided Court of Appeals panel reversed and ordered a new trial, holding that her two causation experts, an orthopedic surgeon and an infectious disease specialist, lacked the neurological experience to testify. On April 8, 2020, the Minnesota Supreme Court reversed that decision. Chief Justice Lorie Gildea wrote that both experts had enough training and experience for the trial court to let them address the broader question of whether the surgery caused the MRSA to spread. Sharon Van Dyck and Scott Wilson joined Schmidt and Winter for her in the Court of Appeals, and Eric Magnuson and Patrick Stoneking of Robins Kaplan joined Schmidt in the Supreme Court. On Sept. 8, 2020, the Court of Appeals, on remand, reinstated the $2.5 million verdict.