Rickie Lee Huitt, 65, consulted a urologist at The Iowa Clinic after receiving his prostate cancer screening results. The urologist ordered a biopsy, which was sent to the clinic’s anatomical laboratory for interpretation.
The pathologist, Dr. Joy Trueblood, the laboratory’s director, examined Huitt’s slides and reported that she had found cancer in both sides of his prostate.
Huitt then met with the neurologist who told him that he required a radical prostatectomy to survive his cancer. The surgery left Huitt with erectile dysfunction and incontinence.
Another pathologist later examined Huitt’s prostate as part of the procedure and reported there was no evidence of cancer in his prostate. The previous slides were then sent to the Mayo Clinic for evaluation, which confirmed a lack of prostate cancer in both the biopsy and the prostate specimens.
Huitt and his wife sued The Iowa Clinic and Dr. Joy Trueblood, alleging that Dr. Trueblood had failed to follow standard procedure during her microscopic view of Huitt’s biopsy specimens. The Huitt family asserted that Dr. Trueblood had chosen not to perform an initial or final “double check” to ensure that the requisition order number matched the patient’s name on the specimen slides she was examining and that this led to Huitt receiving another patient’s cancer diagnosis.
The Huitt family also claimed that this mistake resulted from Dr. Trueblood’s practice of scanning stacked requisition orders instead of placing one order under the scanner at a time to prevent it from pulling up multiple requisition orders.
The Huitt family lawsuit did not make a claim for lost income.
The jury signed a verdict in favor of the Huitts in the amount of $12,250,000.
The attorneys successfully handling this case were Nicholas Rowley, Randall Shanks, John Kawai and Mark Hedberg.
Huitt v. Iowa Clinic, P.C., No. LACL 139726 (Iowa Dist. Ct. Polk County).
Kreisman Law Offices has been handling medical malpractice lawsuits, misdiagnosis of cancer cases, nursing home abuse and negligence lawsuits and birth trauma injury cases for individuals, families and loved ones who have been injured, harmed or killed by the carelessness or negligence of a medical provider for more than 40 years in and around Chicago, Cook County and surrounding areas including Skokie, Morton Grove, Northbrook, Palatine, Inverness, Schiller Park, Hanover Park, Bartlett, Bensenville, Franklin Park, Elmhurst, LaGrange Park, Brookfield, Cicero, Joliet, Burr Ridge, Chicago (Chicago Lawn, South Side, Washington Heights, Beverly, West Pullman, Calumet Heights, South Shore, Chinatown, Old Town, Wicker Park, Bronzeville, Edgewater, North Park), Rosemont, Des Plaines, Half Day, Vernon Hills, Libertyville, Wheeling, Westchester, Evergreen Park and Country Club Hills, Ill.
Robert D. Kreisman has been an active member of the Illinois and Missouri bars since 1976.
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