A Montgomery County Circuit Court jury awarded a 24 year old woman $2.35m (£1,502,000) in damages after ruling that doctors had been negligent in her treatment, leading to a loss of fingers, a foot and part of her leg.
Yesenia Rivera was taken to hospital with severe stomach pains, and woke up ten days later to find that doctors had misdiagnosed a kidney blockage and missed a septic infection that had spread throughout her body.
She was told that as a result she would need to have part of one leg and one foot amputated, but following the operations the tips of most of her fingers also fell off.
Rivera’s injury lawyer, Julia Arfaa, said that her client, a 28 year old stay-at-home mother of three was happy about the jury’s decision, although she was not available for comment.
A spokesman for Shady Grove hospital said that the hospital regretted the ‘life-changing situation’ faced by Ms Rivera, but said that an internal investigation found that their doctors had delivered the care consistent with the hospital’s commitment to quality and patient safety.
The doctors involved had been working for a physicians group that had a contract with the hospital.
Rivera had been living in the US since immigrating from El Salvador when she was eight years old, and was working, living with her boyfriend and caring for two children when she first went to the Shady Grove emergency room in August 2006, complaining of pain in her left side. The initial scans showed that she had a kidney stone and she was sent home with pain medication the following day.
When Rivera returned to the hospital two days later, the doctors decided she was either suffering from a gallbladder problem or a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, and a septic infection was left untreated. The infection was picked up twelve hours later and a urologic surgeon removed the kidney blockage.
Gangrene set in and as a result doctors had to amputate part of Rivera’s left leg and part of her right foot. The tips of her fingers simply fell off, and Rivera had to spend most of the next six months in hospital. She was then moved to a nursing home for intensive physical therapy.
Rivera now depends upon prosthetics and is unable to work.
