Sometimes women have uncontrolled bleeding immediately after delivering a child. If left untreated, the woman can die. It is, therefore, a condition that the physicians must watch for and treat immediately. In this case, a young woman had uncontrolled bleeding after delivering her first child. Although she was in the hospital, her signs of distress went unnoticed. She bled for some time and, as a result, she suffered severe brain damage.

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$7,250,000 Wrongful Death- Midtrial Settlement (Illinois)

Pap smears and mammograms are two routine and regular tests ordered to identify cancer in its early stages-when it is curable. When a doctor or hospital misreads pap smears or mammograms, the result can be catastrophic. In this case, a young mother of four children had a routine pap smear that was misread. She subsequently died after suffering a long, painful course with cervical cancer.

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$3,000,000 Wrongful Death - Pretrial Settlement (Illinois)

One of the known risks of abdominal surgery is infection, and like all infections, the earlier the treatment the better the outcome. A man presented to the emergency room a week and a half after a colostomy closure surgery. When the man presented to the emergency room, he had obvious signs of infection and an abdominal problem that would require surgery. There was an initial delay in calling for a surgeon. Then, a sequence of surgeons had to be called before any surgeon agreed to come to the hospital to operate on the man. As a result, there was a delay of over eight hours in starting the emergency operation which was needed to treat the infection and its cause. Due to the delay, the infection spread and the patient did not survive.

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$4,000,000 Brain Injury-Pretrial Settlement (Illinois)

After a woman goes into labor, doctors will monitor the baby's heart rate. This is called fetal heart rate monitoring. If the baby gets in trouble during labor-has trouble getting oxygen-the baby's heart rate will change. Doctors and nurses are trained to watch for these changes. If these changes are serious and persistent, they are required to get the baby out, usually by caesarean section as quickly as possible. In this case, the baby began to show signs of distress-she was being deprived of oxygen-but these signs were missed, delaying the baby's delivery. As a result, the baby was deprived of oxygen and suffered severe brain injury. Brain injuries like this are called, cerebral palsy.

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