Failure To Diagnose Brain Tumor

Gerry Oginski: Welcome, thank you for joining me. I am Gerry Oginski in New York Medical Malpratice & Personal Injury Trial Lawyer practicing law here in the state of New York. Here is the straight truth about a case I handled not too long ago involving the failure to diagnose a brain tumor.
The women that I represented was a home health care aid and was taking a patient in an ambulette to a doctors visit. During the course of taking the patient to the doctors visit, the ambulette was involved in a car accident and as a result to that car accident, my client got thrown about in the ambulette, hit her head and needed to go to the hospital. The doctors wanted to look to see whether there was anything going on in her head. And the patient was kept in the emergency room for number of hours until that CAT scan could be read and interpreted.
The doctor who interpreted that particular CAT scan known as a radiologist, recognized that there was a mass growing in this patient's brain and in fact, recorded that information in his report. The problem was, that information never got to the emergency room doctor. That information was never conveyed to the patient. Had this tumor been recognized at the time this patient could have had surgery to remove that tumor and it would not have had any impact at all on her eye. The unfortunate reality was that the tumor had now been pressing on the patient's optic nerve for many months literally cutting off the blood supply and choking it day by day. To the point where this patient no longer had any vision at all and any attempt to remove the tumor at this point would be useless in terms of trying to restore the patient's vision. Nevertheless, the doctors had to go in surgically to remove the brain tumor because it was creating a problem and it was encompassing part of the brain.
So they had to remove that and it was a Benign tumor that simply occupied space and cut off blood supply. Nothing else was affected in this patient except the damage to her optic nerve. If this patient had known that she had a tumor in her brain she would have immediately made an appointment with a neurosurgeon and had surgery shortly afterwards to remove the tumor and she would have perfect vision today. The unfortunate fact is that she doesn't. She is blind in one eye and suffered as a result of the improper medical care she received from the original hospital. And that's the straight truth about failure to diagnose this brain tumor in this young women. I want to thank you for spending a few moments of your time here in my office with me. I am Gerry Oginski, have a great day.


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