Jury awards $21M in fatal brain surgery mix-up

It wasn't supposed to be brain surgery.

A jury awarded the family of an 81-year-old Belleville woman $21 million this week in a lawsuit against Oakwood Hospital. The family claimed the hospital mistakenly operated on her brain in January 2012 when she just needed a simple procedure on her jaw.

Bimla Nayyar never recovered from the surgery and died 60 days later.

Oakwood Hospital is not admitting any wrongdoing and said it will appeal Wednesday's verdict in Wayne County Circuit Court.

In a statement, Oakwood said, "We're very concerned about how the details of this case have been portrayed." Paula Rivera-Kerr, spokeswoman for Oakwood Healthcare, said she could not give further comment.

Oakwood Hospital is part of Oakwood Healthcare and the newly formed Beaumont Health system of southeast Michigan.

Attorney Geoffrey Fieger, representing Nayyar's family, said in an interview Thursday that he could not recall a worse mix-up and initial cover-up by a hospital.

"In 37 years of practice, this is the most shocking abuse I have ever seen," Fieger said.

Nayyar had been admitted to Oakwood Hospital in Dearborn in January 2012 for a procedure to treat her bilateral jaw displacement. She was already in precarious health and recovering from a heart attack she had suffered in October.

But after mixing up her CT scan results with those of another patient, hospital staff thought that Nayyar had bleeding in her brain and needed immediate surgery, according to the family's lawsuit.

She was wheeled into an operating room, the lawsuit said, where five holes were drilled into her head and the right side of her skull was sawed out and replaced.

"They poked around in her brain, couldn't find anything and closed her up," Fieger said.

Afterward, a doctor told Nayyar's family that they found no skull fracture or brain bleeding and that there must have been a mix-up in the radiology records, the lawsuit says. The hospital did not disclose to the family the full extent of their error until those details emerged at trial, Fieger said.

In a sworn affidavit, Oakwood Hospital's chief quality and patient safety officer described how hospital staff determined that the CT scan, which they thought had been done on Nayyar, was actually done on a different patient.

However, the patient safety officer, Sara Atwell, said this mix-up wasn't the result of a failure on Oakwood's part to develop and follow proper procedures.

Nayyar never recovered from surgery and lingered on life support for 60 days. She died in hospice care on March 11, 2012, once she was taken off a ventilator.

Fieger said he believes the jury's award is the largest medical negligence award this year in Michigan.

Bloomfield Hills attorney Deborah Gordon, a prominent trial lawyer who has won several multimillion-dollar verdicts, said the size of the jury's award in this case is unusual for a patient of advanced age and likely reflects the strength of Fieger's case.

In hospital death cases, jurors are instructed to consider the number of years the person might have lived, Gordon said. Cases that result in large awards often involve babies who were harmed during delivery.

"In my opinion, for a 81-year-old to get a $21-million verdict is a hugely successful result," she said. "He must have presented to jurors a lot of evidence that the pain and suffering was significant, that the whole event was so wrong."

Another prominent attorney, Keefe Brooks of Birmingham, said the verdict amount could be cut down substantially as the case continues. He noted how economic damages in such cases are to be based on the individual's lost future wages.

"So I'm not sure how there would be much in the way of economic damages" for someone who is 81, he said. "This verdict could well be below a million dollars when it's done."

Nayyar was survived by her husband, Ramesh Nayyar, two daughters, a son and several grandchildren. The family brought her ashes to her native India, where, in Hindu custom, they were spread at the holy River Ganges.

Oakwood Hospital is part of Oakwood Healthcare and the newly formed Beaumont Health system of southeast Michigan.

Contact JC Reindl: 313-222-6631 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @JCReindl.

How the jury determined its $21-million award:

• $300,000 for medical and funeral expenses

• $13 million for damages for pain and suffering

• $4.5 million for damages suffered by next of kin.

• $2.2 million for damages to be suffered in future by next of kin.

(Plus $1 million for interest and other expenses, according to Fieger)

Source: Wayne County Circuit Court documents