Jury awards $126.6 million in failure-to-diagnose verdict

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BOSTON — A New York woman who claims she sat unattended in a hospital for hours while medical personnel negligently failed to diagnose her heart attack has won a $126.6 million jury verdict.

Debora Sohl, an office manager and former horse trainer, claimed she suffered permanent injuries after the medical staff of A. O. Fox Memorial Hospital in Oneonta, N.Y. failed to recognize she was having a heart attack.

“In a nutshell, the jury didn’t believe the hospital’s expert, and awarded her damages for pain and suffering and her tremendous future medical expenses,” said Sohl’s lawyer, James D. Linnan of Linnan & Fallon in Albany, N.Y.

Messages seeking comment from David F. McCarthy, who represented the hospital at trial, were not returned. A statement issued by the hospital’s president, John R. Remillard, said that the hospital plans to appeal.

‘Like something sitting on my chest’

In her complaint, Sohl claimed that in January of 2009, she woke up feeling ill, but went to work anyway. According to Linnan, once she was at work she continued to experience adverse symptoms, including crushing chest pain that radiated down her left arm and up to her jaw. She told her coworker, who is also her ex-husband, about her symptoms.

“She said, ‘I feel really lousy; I feel just strange,’” Linnan said. “She said, ‘I have this terrible chest pain. I feel like something is sitting on my chest.’”

Her ex-husband, who had suffered a heart attack in the past, recognized the symptoms and drove her to the emergency room of Fox Memorial.

After being checked by emergency room medical staff, Sohl, who had a history of anxiety, was given anti-anxiety medication, according to Linnan. When her chest pain persisted, she was also given pain medication.

An electrocardiogram was performed, but Linnan said the emergency room doctor misread the results.

“He reads the results as reassuring that there was just a hysterical female in his emergency room,” Linnan said. “He decides she is not having a heart attack.”

Linnan said Sohl remained in the hospital through the night, at times lying on a gurney in a hallway. Her charts indicated that the doctor planned to discharge her.

The next morning Sohl’s ex-husband, unhappy with her care, called his own cardiologist. That doctor, whose office was located across the street from the hospital, came to the emergency room, observed Sohl’s condition and immediately called to have her transferred by ambulance to another hospital’s intensive care unit, Linnan said.

“Within five minutes of the ambulance pulling up the hospital door, she was in its cardiac catheterization lab,” he said.

The doctors determined that Sohl had suffered a heart attack that required immediate surgery.

“Basically, she was getting less than half the blood to her body that she should be getting,” Linnan said.

During her surgery, one of her arteries was inadvertently dissected – a fact that would prove to be at the center of Fox Hospital’s defense at trial. In the end, Sohl was left with permanent injuries that will require medical treatment for the rest of her life, including the need for a heart transplant in the future.

Expert testimony crucial

At trial, Sohl’s attorneys argued that the failure of hospital staff to immediately identify the signs of her heart attack, refer her to a cardiologist and evaluate her for a cardiac catheterization led to her permanent injuries.

Linnan said he relied on the hospital record to show that the brunt of the damage suffered by Sohl came before the surgery.

“Her cardiac catheterization film taken when she first arrived at the [second] hospital and before surgery showed that the front [section of her heart] was relatively motionless,” Linnan said. “It was just sitting there.”

Linnan said that his case was bolstered by the fact that the jury seemed less than impressed by the defendant’s expert.

“The jury was mad at [the defense] expert, who was this arrogant little twit who didn’t know what he was talking about,” Linnan said. “I think they were also mad that the hospital would do that [to Sohl]. But most of the verdict was based on the hard medical facts.”

After a trial that lasted a week and a half, it took only hours for the six-member jury to return a verdict in Sohl’s favor in the amount of $126,642,039. Though the amount includes $16 million for future pain and suffering, the vast majority consists of estimated future medical costs for Sohl’s care over the next 32 years, including the use of defibrillators, ventricular devices and a likely heart transplant, for a total cost that exceeds $100 million.

During the litigation, the plaintiff’s attorneys made a settlement demand of $1.9 million, Linnan said. The defendant countered with $475,000, and the matter proceeded to trial.

Linnan said even he did not expect such a large award.

“Yes, I was surprised. Anybody who tells you that they are not surprised by a verdict in excess of $100 million isn’t being honest,” he said. “But when you compute 32 years of future medical expenses, increasing [by] 6.5 percent per year, that number really is huge.”

The award exceeds what the hospital’s insurance coverage was at the time of the injury. Linnan said he is pursuing whether the insurance policy of the hospital’s new owners will cover the award.