Virginia Moraites, a 77-year-old retiree, underwent a total left knee replacement at Vista Medical Center East in Waukegan, Ill., on Oct. 13, 2009. The inpatient procedure was done by the defendant orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Gerard Goshgarian. On the morning after the surgery, Oct. 14, 2009, a nurse found that Moraites…
Michael Mills was 28 and had a history of smoking and borderline hypertension. He experienced chest pain for a year. He had seen a cardiologist, Dr. Hassan Kassamali, who ordered an echocardiogram, which was shown to be normal. Mills had two additional appointments with Dr. Kassamali for his continued symptoms…
Ezekiel Flores, 89, was admitted to MacNeal Hospital in Berwyn, Ill., in January 2013 for complaints of leg pain. While he was there, an abdominal CT scan came back with abnormal results, which led the doctors to suspect possible colon cancer over diverticulitis. The defendant gastroenterologist, Dr. Manuel Alva, did…
Dawn Arrigoni, 35, went to the emergency room at Woodwinds Hospital complaining of vomiting, fever and abdominal pain. The nurses there attempted to place a peripheral IV but had trouble placing it. A nurse practitioner then placed an intraosseous (IO) line. An intraosseous infusion line is used in the process…
Rose Newsome received treatment at the University of Illinois Hospital on March 12, 1995 when she alleged that she sustained a brain injury caused by medical negligence. Newsome and her husband, Hatler, hired attorney Zane Smith and his law firm to represent both of them in a medical malpractice lawsuit…
Dr. Terry Polt was 61 years old when she underwent an embolization procedure to treat her chronic nosebleeds. An embolization procedure involves the selected occlusion of blood vessels by purposely introducing clots to a blood vessel. Embolization is generally used to treat a wide variety of conditions affecting different organs…
In 2011, a radiologist with the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) missed identifying a cancerous mass in the liver of James Avery Deweese. Before the mass was finally diagnosed as cancerous in 2013, it had nearly doubled in size. Deweese died shortly thereafter. The family of Deweese — through…
A neuropathologist, Dr. Meena Gujrati, and her employer, Central Illinois Pathology, were named as defendants in a medical-malpractice lawsuit brought by Rebecca Gapinski who alleged that this doctor misdiagnosed Daniel Gapinski’s brain tumor as being benign. Right before the start of the jury trial, Dr. Gujrati requested permission to proceed…
Nerisa Williams was 43 years old when she underwent a hysterectomy that was completed by her gynecologist, Dr. Kenneth Baker. During the surgery, Dr. Baker unknowingly transected or cut Williams’s ureter. The ureter is made up of two tubes of smooth muscle fibers that propel urine from the kidneys to…
Annually in the U.S., at least 3.5 million people are treated for traumatic brain injuries (TBI). A recent article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s neurology section reports that the development of therapies for TBI has been limited by the absence of diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers. The…