Delay in Treatment Will Cost Hospital Millions

A Texas hospital must pay a multimillion-dollar judgment for failing to treat a woman’s spinal injury in time to prevent paralysis, according to a report on WFAA.com, among other news sites.

On March 21, 2019, Judy “Jessie” Adams, then part of a singing-songwriting duo with her husband, Richard, went to Premier Interventional Pain Management, in Flower Mound, Texas, prior to the couple’s drive to Ohio for a funeral. At Premier, Jesse received an epidural steroid injection (ESI) that she hoped would ease her back pain during the long drive.

Instead, the injection ended up increasing her pain.

“He [the pain physician] gave me the shot, but I couldn’t feel my legs. They were tingling, but I couldn’t feel them,” Adams explained. “The pain was so bad in my back.” In their suit, Adams and her husband alleged that the doctor had probably “nicked a blood vessel during the ESI procedure, causing Jessie to hemorrhage.” (The couple’s suit against the doctor was settled prior to trial.)

Jessie remained under observation at the pain facility for about 1½ hours, at which point she was taken by ambulance to nearby Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. There, in the emergency department (ED), staff ordered a “STAT MRI” in preparation for an emergency laminectomy.

For reasons that remain murky, the MRI wasn’t performed for 1 hour and 37 minutes. The emergency laminectomy itself it wasn’t started until more than 5 hours after Adams had been admitted to the ED. This was a direct violation of hospital protocol, which required that emergency surgeries be performed within 1 hour of admittance in the first available surgical suite. (At trial, Adams’s attorneys from Lyons & Simmons offered evidence that a suite became available 49 minutes after Adams had arrived at the ED.)

During the wait, Adams continued to experience excruciating pain. “I kept screaming, ‘Help me,’ ” she recalls today. At trial, her attorneys argued that the hospital’s delay in addressing her spinal emergency led directly to her current paralysis, which keeps her confined to a wheelchair and renders her incontinent.

The hospital disagreed. In court, it maintained that Adams was already paralyzed when she arrived at the ED and that there was no delay in care.

The jury saw things differently, however. Siding with the plaintiffs, it awarded Adams and her husband $10.1 million, including $500,000 for Richard Adams’s loss of future earnings and $1 million for his “loss of consortium” with his wife.

Their music career now effectively over, Richard spends most of his time taking care of Jessie.