South Florida Injury Lawyers Blog
A jury in Illinois has awarded a near-record $53 million to a young boy born with a serious brain injury after his mother says he suffered 12 hours of fetal distress during her full-term delivery.
The damage award was announced following a month-long trial in which the boy’s mother and legal guardian sued the hospital and several doctors for not sooner recognizing and acting on the obvious signs of fetal distress her unborn child was experiencing. The appropriate course of action, she contended, would have been an emergency c-section as soon as she was admitted to the hospital. This should have been clear, she said, as soon as she was hooked up to the fetal monitoring unit after she reported that her child had stopped moving inside her womb.
Unfortunately, it was around 2 a.m. when she arrived at the hospital and only student residents were on staff to care for her. Plaintiff attorneys presented evidence indicating those residents were either occupied, sleeping or unable to fully grasp or adequately respond to the severity of her situation. For 12 hours, her lawyers explained to jurors, her son was slowly suffocating. Continue reading →