Case Closed, Episode 1: A Fatal Mistake

My name is Cliff Argentar, I’m a partner here at Duffy & Duffy, and today I’m going to be talking about a case involving a 68-year-old woman who tragically died following a hiatal hernia surgery.

This case involved a woman who went to the defendant doctor for a hernia repair which is a pretty common surgery to have and typically patients are discharged the same day after this type of surgery. However what the case was about was that with this particular patient our client that she should have been held overnight due to her increased risk factors for postoperative complications.

Any surgical case is very challenging because there’s a lot of risks and complications that are associated with surgeries that can happen without any negligence or medical malpractice. The tough part in this case was proving that our client and in this patient was different in the sense that because of prior stenting that she had in her arteries that she was at an increased risk for complications and therefore should have been viewed and held in the hospital overnight. That did not happen in this case and as a result of that the following day she returned back to the hospital with severe amounts of pain and they ended up finding out that multiple organs, the liver, pancreas, the intestines, they had all liquefied and ended up dying.

A big part of our case is that prior to doing the surgery is that the defendant should have consulted with a vascular surgeon due to our client’s prior stenting that she had in her arteries. And I asked him how long would that have taken to pick up the phone, call a vascular surgeon, and ask “should I keep this patient overnight due to this these prior stentings?” And he said that it would have taken him or his office a minute 2 minutes to pick up the phone and make a phone call and he failed to do that. And I think at that point the jury realized that it should have been done.

So the jury unanimously agreed with with our position that our client should have been held overnight and they awarded the family of $2.5 million. This one was very satisfying for a lot of reasons. One, the defendant in this case was very difficult and combative. He offered no money prior to the trial and was very adversarial with me when I had him on the stand and during cross-examination. It was very difficult to get simple answers out of him on the witness stand, so, on a personal level, it felt good to win a case like this.