Baltimore Jury Awards $5.87 Million After Hospital Staff Failed to Treat Post-Operative Cardiac Tamponade

Elsie Mae Mason underwent heart valve replacement surgery at the University of Maryland Medical Center on June 10, 2016. The procedure itself was completed, but the days that followed proved fatal. On June 13, three days after surgery, Mason went into cardiac arrest and suffered severe brain damage. She died six days later on June 19, 2016.

The cause, according to the lawsuit filed by her adult children in 2018, was cardiac tamponade: a buildup of fluid around the heart that compresses it and prevents normal pumping. Cardiac tamponade is a recognized complication of open-heart procedures, and the medical records generated by UMMS itself referenced the condition repeatedly. Despite those notations, the hospital's defense at trial was that Mason never developed the complication at all.

Plaintiff attorneys Michael V. McCubbin and H. Briggs Bedigian of Gilman and Bedigian LLC in Timonium presented the hospital's own records as the heart of the case. The records documented the signs of tamponade while staff on the ground failed to act on them. Specialists were not summoned for more than an hour after Mason began deteriorating. In cardiac emergencies, the attorneys argued, the delay itself is the injury: minutes determine whether the heart recovers or fails.

Jury selection began January 6, 2020, in Baltimore City Circuit Court before Judge Marcus Z. Shar. After several days of testimony and hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict on January 14, 2020, awarding Mason's estate and children $62,177 in economic damages, $9,972 in funeral expenses, and $5.8 million in noneconomic damages, for a total of $5,872,149. Maryland law caps noneconomic damages in personal-injury cases, reducing that portion to approximately $962,500. UMMS said it was evaluating post-trial options and did not believe the verdict was supported by the evidence.

The verdict ranked among the larger medical-malpractice awards in Maryland for 2020. No appellate opinion reversing or modifying the judgment has been identified in public court records.