A Botched Scoliosis Surgery, 10 Days of Delay, and a $135 Million Verdict

In 2010, a 10-year-old girl from Wyandotte, Michigan was admitted to the Children's Hospital of Michigan, part of the Detroit Medical Center, for surgery to correct scoliosis. The operation was meant to straighten the curve in her spine. The surgeon placed rods and screws along the spinal column. The way the hardware was set put pressure on her spinal cord instead of relieving it.

Within a short time the girl reported numbness spreading through her arms and legs. The pressure kept building. She lost control of her bladder and bowels and could no longer move her limbs normally. The straightforward fix was to take the hardware out and relieve the compression. Instead, her surgeon left on vacation, returned, and left again, while she stayed in the hospital and got worse.

The hardware stayed in place for 10 days. A different doctor finally recognized how serious her condition was and removed the rods and screws. By then the harm was permanent. She was left partially paralyzed, with lasting weakness in all four limbs, permanent loss of bladder and bowel control, and a year spent in a wheelchair.

Geoffrey Fieger tried the case in Wayne County Circuit Court, joined by James McCullen. Over a roughly two-week trial, the firm's argument was simple. The screws and rods were placed in a way that compressed the spinal cord. The warning signs were there from the start. The accepted response was to remove the hardware quickly. None of that happened.

The Detroit Medical Center and its surgeons argued that the paralysis came from a blood clot, something they said they could not have prevented. Fieger pressed that no imaging ever showed such a clot. "Nobody saw it, there were no MRIs, or anything that would indicate that," he told reporters.

On July 2, 2018, after deliberating about two and a half hours, the jury returned a verdict of $135 million. At the time it was reported as the largest single medical malpractice verdict in the country. The patient, by then 17, had waited seven years from her injury to the day of the verdict.