Reversed Heart-Lung Machine Lines During a Boy's Open-Heart Surgery: Wisconsin's First Eight-Figure Malpractice Settlement

During open-heart surgery, a 10-year-old boy was placed on a heart-lung machine, the device that takes over the work of the heart and lungs so a surgeon can operate on a still heart. The machine drains blood from the body through a venous line, adds oxygen to it, and pumps it back into circulation through an arterial line. In this operation, those two lines were connected in reverse.

With the arterial and venous connections switched, blood did not move through the boy's body the way it was supposed to. The brain is the organ least able to survive a loss of oxygen-rich blood, even briefly. He came out of the operating room with severe brain damage that would not heal, a child who went in for a heart repair and left needing care for the rest of his life.

The family brought a medical malpractice claim through Cannon & Dunphy, the Milwaukee firm built by William "Bill" Cannon, who spent decades suing hospitals and physicians over preventable harm. The theory was simple to state and hard to defend: connecting the heart-lung lines in the correct direction is one of the most basic steps of the procedure, and reversing them fell far below the accepted standard of care. A heart-lung machine is run by a perfusionist and watched by the surgical team, and getting the inflow and outflow lines right is something the people in the room are trained to confirm.

The case did not reach a jury. It settled for $10 million. At the time, that figure was reported as the first eight-figure personal injury settlement in Wisconsin history. Because the matter resolved by agreement rather than by verdict, the amount was never exposed to an appeal or to a judge's power to cut down a jury award, so the full $10 million stood.

The case became one of the results most tied to Cannon's name, set alongside a separate run of Wisconsin firsts he collected over his career, including the state's first eight-figure jury verdict in a personal injury case. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Cannon won more verdicts and settlements of $10 million or more than any other lawyer in the state. He died in 2023 at the age of 75.