Bizarre, Society, Torts

Woman Goes to Hospital With Kidney Stones and Ultimately Loses Both Legs and Arms — and Lawsuit

gavel2The case of Lisa Strong is a tragedy at almost every level from her first encounter with the medical profession to her last encounter with the legal profession. Strong went to the emergency room with what she believed was kidney stones (she had a history of kidney stones). However, due to malpractice, she ultimately lost both legs and arms. Despite the admission of various mistakes by the medical staff, a jury ruled against her. In a rare move, Broward County Circuit Judge Charles M. Greene threw out the jury verdict and ordered a new trial.

Strong’s nightmare began on Sept. 20, 2003 when she found that she could not walk at her job in the mall and her fever went up to 106 degrees. When she arrived at the ER, she told the nurse that she had kidney stones. The doctors, however, never treated her for kidney stones. For the next month, her condition was not treated and her limbs began to turn black. The problem does not appear to be a lack of evidence of malpractice but a difficulty by the jury in deciding who was most responsible. The result, however, was a verdict against Strong.

The two physicians — emergency room Dr. Laurentina Kocik and attending physician Dr. Jason Strong — have pointed fingers at each other. Dr. Strong (no relation) never came into the hospital and ordered treatment over the telephone.

Dr. Strong insists that no one mentioned kidney stones and Kocik admitted that she wished that she had written kidney stones on the chart. Dr. Strong also says that he was not told that the patient was in septic shock and thus ordered treatment for acute cholecystitis, a gallbladder condition unrelated to the kidneys.

It is exceptionally rare to see a verdict for the defense thrown out. Less than one percent of verdicts are thrown out and I cannot remember the last judgment for a defendant thrown up by the Court in such a case. There is a general feeling among judges that courts should not be seen as forcing citizens to go before multiple juries until they are found guilty. In this case, however, Judge Green found that the jury’s decision was “contrary to the law and the manifest weight of the evidence.”

I personally do not see how a jury could come to this verdict and it sounds like a case where the jury was confused and simply gave up in assigning blame to one or both doctors. This is a standard problem in the medical field where there is often multiple actors and sketchy records. Indeed, the court in Ybarra v. Spangard faced such a problem in terms of causation when no doctor or nurse came forward to identify the responsible party or parties in a case of malpractice. The court allowed the case to continue on the basis of the staff as a whole — a response to what is sometimes called the “conspiracy of silence” in the profession.

This case involved multiple actors but no conspiracy of silence. The court clearly believed that there was obvious evidence of malpractice that the jury simply ignored. However, despite my agreement with him, it is unsettling to have defendants forced to go before another jury because the judge does not like the result. On one hand, I do believe that this was a terrible injustice for Strong and I am glad that she is getting a new opportunity to prove her case. On the other hand, the doctors are also entitled to the benefits of a jury decision in their favor and it may be unfair to assume that the jury simply could not chose between them as the guilty parties. The doctors are appealing his ruling.

For the full story, click here.

23 thoughts on “Woman Goes to Hospital With Kidney Stones and Ultimately Loses Both Legs and Arms — and Lawsuit”

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  7. Jill,

    I am not kissing up to you, just so you will know it. But today the same thing happened to me. So thar ya go.

  8. “I am mystified by this pattern. They appear on my computer”

    lottakatz,

    Thanks! I misread JT’s meaning. I took him to mean the patterns appear on his computer but he meant the posts appear–Well, DUH!

    Interestingly, a little while back a post showed on my computer that I don’t believe showed on yours until about 10-15 mins. later. I think this because of contextual clues. You didn’t respond to JT’s post but instead posted the same information on another thread. When his post showed up to you, you said something like, I should have know JT would have covered this topic. I thought you must not have seen his post because there were already several comments on it, but you didn’t make one.

    Strange. I’m going with the XENU theory.

    I appreciate your help on this matter. Have a good evening!

  9. TOTALLY OFF TOPIC REPLY:

    I didn’t see the two stories disappear so: if it happens only on this blog to you and Professor T (and or anybody else) at the same time it is probably a web-hosting problem. The folks that own the servers that host the blog had a problem. It looked to me from the Professor’s reply that he did not have the problem you did so I responded to you specifically.

    It could have also been a problem with your Internet Service Provider not getting or actually providing a complete packet of information to its subscriber(s), you. With the Internet information is broken up into packets, distributed and (re)assembled at an end point using the World Wide Web (WWW.) protocols and HTML language.

    The glitch could have occurred a number of places since the information for any one page can reside, broken up and transmitted, from a number of physical places. Actually, that is pretty well minimized because the Professor doesn’t have advertisements and other commercial add-ons on his site.

    ‘scuse me, I’m going to the Wiki for a little nostalgia and literate help in this comment.

    How it works. This is from various articles from Wikipedia. Its a ‘how it works’ and very brief history with a few personal comments. Wiki ‘splains it in a proper technical manner far better than I could. Thanks for the opportunity to stroll down memory lane.

    From Wiki:
    INTERNET – how:
    “Packet switching is a network communications method that groups all transmitted data, irrespective of content, type, or structure into suitably-sized blocks, called packets. The network over which packets are transmitted is a shared network which routes each packet independently from all others and allocates transmission resources as needed. The principal goals of packet switching are to optimize utilization of available link capacity and to increase the robustness of communication. When traversing network adapters, switches and other network nodes, packets are buffered and queued, resulting in variable delay and throughput, depending on the traffic load in the network.”

    WWW – what/how:
    “The World Wide Web (commonly abbreviated as “the Web”) is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a Web browser, one can view Web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them using hyperlinks. Using concepts from earlier hypertext systems, the World Wide Web was started in 1989 … a “web of nodes” storing “hypertext pages” viewed by “browsers” on a network, and released that web in December. Connected by the existing Internet, other websites were created, around the world, adding international standards for domain names & the HTML language.

    The World Wide Web enabled the spread of information over the Internet through an easy-to-use and flexible format. It thus played an important role in popularizing use of the Internet. Although the two terms are sometimes conflated in popular use, World Wide Web is not synonymous with Internet.[4] The Web is an application built on top of the Internet.”

    OLD SCHOOL – ARPANet /Usenet
    Packet switching contrasts with another principal networking paradigm, circuit switching, a method which sets up a specific circuit with a limited number dedicated connection of constant bit rate and constant delay between nodes for exclusive use during the communication session.

    ***The first ‘blogs’ we belonged to (early 80’s)were “Bulletin Boards” that were like party line telephones and most of them were geographically local. Most spread by word of mouth among people that shared a community of interest. You would get an internet address for a BB from someone and email the Sysop and ask to be considered for inclusion on the Board.

    The Sysop would want your name and phone number and then CALL you and you would be interviewed. Local Sysops belonged to local and regional councils and had their rules of netiquete and black-lists of people that didn’t play well with others. Sysops could be petty masters and on ocassion were, blacklisting people for personal reasons and adding their names to the regional and national lists of the councils they belonged to.

    There were also national message board and newsgroups on Usenet and you could get their addys from the Usenet list. Usenet was nationwide and anonymous, as it still is today. ***

    From Wiki:
    “During their heyday from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s, most BBSes were run as a hobby free of charge by the system operator (or “SysOp”), while other BBSes charged their users a subscription fee for access, or were operated by a business as a means of supporting their customers. Bulletin Board Systems were in many ways a precursor to the modern form of the World Wide Web and other aspects of the Internet.”

    Early BBSes were often a local phenomenon, as one had to dial into a BBS with a phone line and would have to pay additional long distance charges for a BBS out of the local calling area. Thus, many users of a given BBS usually lived in the same area, and activities such as BBS Meets or Get Togethers, where everyone from the board would gather and meet face to face, were common.

    ****Nice parties, yes indeed! – Girls nights out and a dip in the hot tub to straighten up before you drove home- it was the 80’s baby! There was a great sense of community on the early boards due to the physical proximity. It was a really fun time.****

    From Wiki:
    “Usenet is one of the oldest computer network communications systems still in widespread use… conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979.[1] Users read and post public messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more categories, known as newsgroups…. Usenet resembles bulletin board systems (BBS) in most respects, and is the precursor to the various web forums which are widely used today; and can be superficially regarded as a hybrid between Email and web forums. …”

  10. lottakatz,

    I immediate considered Xenu’s power as well. People on this blog have shown disrespect so I consider this the most likely anwer to the problem.

    Would the things you said apply to JT also? He said his computer does the same thing as mine. That’s what makes me think it’s not a problem with inside my machine’s ghost.

    I don’t understand how this case was decided at all. It seems a real miscarriage of justice.

  11. The previous blog thread about the initial trial in this matter reference “Natural justice” in a couple of comments. I am not familiar with ‘natural justice’ but from the context it seems to infer an aspect of judicial discretion akin to jury nullification in an attempt to see justice done. Am I in the ballpark with that analogy?

    One would hope that there is some mechanism in the law that allows a miscarriage of justice of this magnitude to be rectified. Ms. Strong needs some justice done and I wish her well in the next trial.

    It sounds though like it would be an automatic basis for an appeal of whatever the next verdict might be, by the defense. How often is something like this judges actions upheld on appeal?

  12. OFF TOPIC REPLY

    Jill and JT, It was no doubt Xenu, angered by the appearance of disrespect being shown to his one true church on this blog. A little-known divine proclamation from Xenu states “All your pages are belong to me.” You have been warned. There is though sacred underwear that might help you ward off another attack. 🙂

    It sounds like a web-hosting glitch (from the web-hosting site, not the blog host) or an incomplete load or refresh from the Temp Internet Files on your computer Jill. You can check your ‘Tools” menu, Internet Options, Advanced, and make sure your option “Reuse windows for launching shortcuts [when tabbed browsing is off]” box is checked if this keeps happening and you use a version of WindowsHome. While I am not a tech wizard- the better half is but he’s napping- I do have a passing knowledge of PC and Windows based glitches. Some automatic updates and unplanned program terminations will re-set your preferences to (unwanted) defaults.

  14. On my computer, both the war crimes and scientology posts are now missing and have been replaced by this entry, which is actually from some time ago as mespo has pointed out.

    1. Jill:

      I am mystified by this pattern. They appear on my computer. I am a chimp at this stuff, but I cannot explain this occurrence. Perhaps one of our tech wizards might have a suggestion or two.

  15. Thanks, Mespo. But I am not sure why then it has been reposted here today? Not for me to question I guess.

  17. Without knowing the particular facts of this case it sounds like the Judge was acting as the 13 Juror. And either acted on his own with a term was Sua Sponte and reversed the “No Cause” which is rare and appears in this case the responsible thing to do. He granted what is called a “JNOV” Judgment Not With Standing the Verdict.

    If Texas can set aside the Stipulated Agreed Order by Ford, I guess a lot of things are possible.

    In the instant case I would like to see If the Judge actually made any ruling or had set up the Jury to return such a verdict and this was a ditch to save himself?

  18. Oops, forgive the misread, it appears the trial court threw out the verdict. Even more amazing and gratifying. I do hereby rescind my venom for the appeals court in Florida. Mea culpa, but it’s the happiest one I ever made.

  19. Without sounding like an “I told you so” here is my reply to the winning defense lawyer in this case on this blog. The “victor” was crowing about his successful effort to deny this woman any sort of compensation and hence dignity in the case.

    “jim nossich:

    “I will now wait for some very creative yet ineffective appeal to be filed as a last ditch effort to hold people responsible for something they are not.”

    *********

    Overconfidence about outcomes on appeal makes for foolish-looking lawyers with fewer clients. As to your comment about my bias in favor of plaintiffs, I plead guilty.”

    You know what, I do like being an “I told you so,” and JT you have made my day with this story, maybe my week. I hope Ms. Strong or her husband will chime in as they both did in the previous thread. I am overjoyed that natural justice had the power to move these guardians of the status quo on the appeals court. Emerson was more right than he knew when he said, “Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”

  20. Not being a lawyer, what the hell do I know, but it sounds to me like the judge did the only thing possible to attempt to see that Strong receives some justice in this case. I can understand the jury’s confusion in deciding exactly who was at fault here, but how they decided to rule against Strong as opposed to holding both doctors responsible has me completely nonplused.

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