San Francisco Jury Awards $38.6 Million for Stroke Patient Left With Brain-Stem Injury

On the evening of July 31, 2010, Kody Myrick was working cattle on a ranch with his father when he suddenly slumped over and could no longer speak clearly. His father drove him to the emergency room at Bakersfield Memorial Hospital. The signs pointed to a stroke in progress, the kind of emergency where every hour of delay costs brain tissue that does not come back.

Around midnight, after Myrick had already spent hours in the emergency department, the ER physician phoned the on-call hospitalist, Dr. Sahaphun Hansa, to admit him. Hansa later acknowledged that the call lasted between one and five minutes. He knew no neurologist had examined the patient, yet he asked no questions about the findings, ordered no emergency neurology consult, and admitted Myrick under a note that read "possible stroke." He never came to the hospital to see him.

The next morning Myrick's condition collapsed. He became unresponsive and aspirated. An angiogram finally revealed what had been building overnight: an occluded basilar artery, one of the vessels that supplies the brain stem. By the time the stroke was diagnosed, the injury was permanent. Myrick, 19, was left with brain-stem damage and incomplete tetraplegia, dependent on others for the ordinary tasks of daily life.

Walkup, Melodia, Kelly & Schoenberger tried the case in San Francisco County Superior Court. Conor Kelly and Melinda Derish represented Myrick. Several other defendants, including the hospital, the emergency medicine group, and the ER doctor, settled before trial, so the case went to the jury against Hansa alone. Kelly's team showed that a prompt neurology consult and stroke treatment would have changed the result, and that a phone call of a few minutes was no substitute for the bedside evaluation a neurologic emergency required.

In 2013 the jury fixed Myrick's total damages at $38,614,587, with a present cash value of $12,357,587. It was reported as the largest medical malpractice verdict in the history of San Francisco Superior Court and the largest single-plaintiff personal injury verdict in Northern California that year. California's malpractice statute, known as MICRA, caps noneconomic damages at $250,000, which limited that portion of the award.

Hansa appealed, arguing that the trial court mishandled the jury instructions and that the evidence did not support the verdict. In February 2015 the California Court of Appeal rejected both arguments and affirmed the judgment.