Case Closed, Episode 5: When Pain Turns to Paralysis

Hi my name is Mary Ellen Duffy, I’m with the law firm of Duffy & Duffy, I’m a partner here. Today I was going to tell about a case that I’ve had recently where a woman, mid-40s, very active life, began to experience some flu like symptoms and then went to her doctor complaining of some neck pain. And this went on for a series of probably a few weeks, progressively getting worse, seeking constantly Primary Care, pain management, everybody basically not recognizing the significance of the pain she was in, in the context of what they were trying to tell her was wrong.

Ultimately it got so bad that she went to the emergency room and in the emergency room they saw her for a few hours but it was very clear that they were blowing her off in the emergency room. And they sent her home with the normal instructions that they give to everybody, “if it gets worse come back”. Two days goes by and she realizes that she hasn’t gone to the bathroom. Cut to, an ambulance is called. She now cannot stand up, she cannot move, she’s taken back to the hospital. They finally realized that she had an infection in the area of the the vertebrae or the spinal cord that became what they call an abscess or a collection that was pressing on her spinal cord. In the end unfortunately she wound up with paralysis as a result of this. If they had done something even as late as her going to the emergency room, she would have been fine.

There were a couple of big challenges. One was, they had an argument that when she went home from the hospital, the emergency room, she stayed home and she should have come back sooner given that she was having other problems. So that was a big hurdle we had to overcome.

I think the turning point was flipping that emergency room visit against them. There were ways that I utilized what they had in their own record to say, “well if you were that concerned about it, then you should have kept her there.” Because even though they didn’t have it documented, they tried to say that they gave her the option of staying in the hospital. And that is not what happened. If they had given her that option, she would have taken it. But by making that story up to try to defend themselves, they put themselves in a box. Which then allowed me to say, “Well if you gave her the option to stay, there had to be a reason for that. And if you were that concerned, why didn’t you call in a consultant to see what was actually going on or send her for some type of imaging, instead of sending her on her way with more pain medication that hadn’t done anything for the past month anyway.”

We ultimately were able to resolve the case for $4.5 million, which I was very pleased with. In the end she got a good resolution, but it’s nothing in comparison to what her life would have been if she hadn’t been injured in the first place.