$5.5M Verdict For Cancer Misdiagnosis: On March 17, 2023, a California medical malpractice jury returned its verdict in the amount of $5,461,993 in favor of the 50-year-old emergency room nurse and mother of a severely disabled daughter, who alleged that the defendant pathologist negligently failed to diagnose her cancer following a routine appendectomy in November 2013.
The defendant pathologist, Dr. Andrea Ong of Diagnostic Pathology Medical Group, admitted her medical negligence in failing to detect the cancer cells in the pathology slides but argued through her medical experts that the plaintiff’s cancer was untreatable and incurable at the time of her appendectomy, and therefore the nearly six-year delay in diagnosis did not make any difference in the outcome – the defense experts testified during trial that the plaintiff’s cancer was goblet cell adenocarcinoma, which is rare but always fatal. The plaintiff’s six pathologists and medical oncologists who were involved in her treatment testified that she had appendiceal adenocarcinoma, which is treatable.
The plaintiff had returned to her full-time work after the uneventful November 2013 appendectomy until she was diagnosed with what was presumed to be metastatic ovarian cancer, for which she underwent a total hysterectomy in June 2019. The pathologist who reviewed the slides from the hysterectomy suspected that the primary site of her cancer was gastrointestinal and not ovarian. The pathologist then requested and reviewed the pathology slides from the 2013 appendectomy, and found appendiceal cancer cells that the defendant pathologist had failed to identify.
The plaintiff received aggressive chemotherapy following her hysterectomy in 2019. Unfortunately, her cancer metastasized to her large and small intestines. She had a large segment of her colon surgically removed in 2022, followed by more chemotherapy. Her experts testified during trial that she has been disabled since 2019, her cancer will likely prove to be fatal, and that her life expectancy is substantially reduced by several decades. They also testified that the almost six-year delay in her cancer diagnosis resulted in avoidable pelvic metastasis, which necessitated the two major surgeries in 2019 and 2022.
After three weeks of trial, the California medical malpractice jury voted eleven-to-one to award the plaintiff $961,993 in special damages for her past medical bills and past and future income losses, and general damages for pain and suffering in the amount of $3,000,000 for past general damages and $1,500,000 for future general damages. The noneconomic damages are subject to California’s cap on such damages in medical malpractice cases in the amount of $250,000, which means that instead of receiving $4,500,00 for her pain and suffering as determined by the jury, she will be entitled to only $250,000.
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