CMG Law partners Tyler Goldberg-Hoss and Carl-Erich Kruse recently completed an all-Zoom medical negligence case against a major medical system. This is the second successful all-Zoom trial for Tyler and Carl-Erich. CMG Law alleged that our client suffered serious injury because the system failed to adopt procedures to ensure its patients received safe anticoagulation management.
Our client suffered from an unprovoked pulmonary embolism shortly after he turned 21 years old. A pulmonary embolism (PE) is a blood clot that gets caught in the blood vessels of the lungs, interfering with the lung’s ability to oxygenate blood.
The cause of the PE was never determined, which is why it is called ‘unprovoked’. Our client received three months of anticoagulation therapy through the same hospital system. The system’s own guidelines advises its providers to prescribe anticoagulants indefinitely in patients with low bleeding risk (like our client) and unprovoked pulmonary embolism (again, like our client). For some reason the original order was for only three months. Later, a different provider at the same facility deemed three months to be sufficient and terminated our client’s therapy without further inquiry into the status of the clots in his lungs.
Without ongoing therapy, he developed new clots in his lungs. The new clot burden became too much for his system, and the clots scarred into his lungs. He developed a complex medical condition called chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH). Our client then had to undergo a complex surgery where surgeons opened up his chest and stripped out the largest remaining clots along with the vessel linings to which they had adhered. He suffered some complications following the surgery that necessitated more than three months in the ICU. He lost nearly 80 pounds and spent months unable to walk. After many months of intensive therapy he relearned to walk. He has permanent drop foot (in inability to lift your foot up, necessary to walk) and psychological injury from the traumatic ICU stay.
Our expert witnesses testified that our client developed new clots because his anticoagulation therapy had been terminated when it should not have, and the new clots in turn caused him to develop CTEPH. Our client had been taken off of anticoagulants because the defendant lacked a system to protect him. The defendant’s impressive experts testified that our client suffered, instead, from a rare condition that prevented him from dissolving clots, and he was always destined to develop CTEPH. The jury considered the defense position merely a “theory” that did not match the facts presented.
The parties reached a satisfactory resolution while the jury was deliberating.
