Case Closed, Episode 2: A Diagnosis Gone Wrong

My name is Cliff Argentar. I’m a partner here at Duffy & Duffy. And today I’m going to be speaking about a case involving a 40-year-old woman where there was a delay in diagnosis of her spinal disease.

So, the case really revolved around an emergency room visit that my 40-year-old client had where she presented to the emergency room with severe lower back pain that was radiating to her legs. The issue in the case was, did she have numbness in her vaginal area or didn’t she? Because if she did have vaginal numbness, there was a further workup that everyone agreed should be done. If she did not, then everyone agreed that the workup was adequate.

These emergency rooms, they deal with patients with back pain all the time, and sometimes they get caught in cutting corners and doing the same workup over and over again, because most of the time if you have low back pain, if it’s radiating to your legs, you don’t have a significant health issue. Well, we had no choice but to try the case, because the defendants made no settlement offer before trial. And the difficult thing about the case is that the defendant doctor in this case in the emergency room asked my client “did she have any numbness in her vaginal area”? And she responded no. But what our argument was is that the doctor should have done a physical exam and gotten objective evidence uh of whether or not she had numbness in that area, rather than just relying on a history.

When I was cross-examining the doctor when I had him on the stand and I asked him, “How long would it have taken you to perform a physical exam to objectively get evidence of whether or not there was sensation or numbness in the vaginal area?” And when he testified that it only would have taken 30 seconds to a few minutes, at that point I thought we’d won the case.

The jury unanimously agreed with me and my client and found that the defendant doctor in the defendant emergency room was negligent in failing to do a proper workup. And they awarded my client $1.45 million. I mean, she had been through a lot of pain in the past and she’s going to continue to have a lot of pain and health problems in the future because of her misdiagnosis. So, although I love to win cases, -it’s a great relief for me and I’m very competitive- really at the end of the day, it’s more about the client.