Coles County Jury Awards $561,390 After Surgeon Cuts Patient's Common Bile Duct During Gallbladder Removal
After trial: The Illinois Appellate Court, Fourth District, affirmed the verdict on January 23, 2007, finding no abuse of discretion in the trial court's evidentiary rulings. The opinion does not state when the trial was held, so the year is inferred from the 2006 appeal docket.
Won by Kralovec, Jambois & Schwartz, Other counsel and Schwartz Jambois.
A Coles County, Illinois jury awarded Katherine Adams $561,389.90 against Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center and surgeon Dr. Kellie Jones-Monahan. During a routine laparoscopic gallbladder removal on November 15, 2002, the surgeon divided Adams's common bile duct, and she needed an ambulance transfer to a St. Louis hospital and a reconstructive operation. At trial the surgeon admitted that the common bile duct had been mistakenly dissected. The Illinois Appellate Court, Fourth District, affirmed the verdict in January 2007.
What happened
Katherine Adams went to Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center in Coles County, Illinois, on November 15, 2002, for what was meant to be a routine laparoscopic gallbladder removal. Her surgeon, Dr. Kellie Jones-Monahan, had warned her beforehand that the operation carried risks, including injury to the common bile duct, and that she might need to convert to open surgery if problems came up. Adams consented.
During the operation the surgeon noted that the gallbladder was almost entirely encased in the liver and that there was chronic scarring around the bile ducts. The gallbladder came out, but Dr. Jones-Monahan also divided the common bile duct, which is not supposed to happen in this procedure. She found the damage only when she took an X-ray of the ducts, a cholangiogram, while Adams was still in the operating room.
The surgeon called Dr. Steven Strasberg, a hepatobiliary specialist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, and Adams was sent there by ambulance. Dr. Strasberg became her treating physician. In February 2003 he operated to rebuild the drainage system, joining the remaining bile ducts to a loop of her small intestine in a procedure called a hepaticojejunostomy. He described the injury as an E4 injury, in which the left and right bile ducts had been separated from each other. After the repair he followed her liver function over the following years, and an MRI in early 2005 showed a narrowing at the new connection that he chose to monitor.
The case was tried in the Circuit Court of Coles County before Judge Dale A. Cini. Adams was represented by Steven K. Jambois and Alexander M. Sukhman of Kralovec, Jambois & Schwartz, with Michael W. Rathsack of Chicago arguing the appeal. Her surgical expert, Dr. Richard Vasquez, testified that the surgeon had departed from the standard of care by cutting structures before taking a cholangiogram, by not dissecting within the triangle of Calot, and by not converting to open surgery when she could not clearly identify the anatomy. Dr. Jones-Monahan herself agreed that a misidentification had occurred and that the common bile duct had been mistakenly dissected, and she acknowledged that an incomplete dissection was a deviation from the standard of care. She said she was still unsure how the injury happened.
The jury returned a verdict of $561,389.90. It awarded $95,570.90 for medical care and treatment, $3,819 in lost earnings, $250,000 for pain and suffering, and $212,000 for loss of normal future life experience. The trial court denied the defendants' motion for a new trial.
The hospital and surgeon appealed on two evidentiary points: the trial court's limits on how they could use Dr. Strasberg's deposition testimony, and the questioning of their own expert, Dr. Mark Kadowaki, about Dr. Strasberg's views on his preferred surgical technique. In an opinion filed January 23, 2007, the Fourth District rejected both arguments and affirmed the judgment.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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