Family awarded $3.5M after ER doctor misdiagnoses fatal stroke
The family of Melanie Smith, a mother of two who died in 2015 at the age of 40, was awarded $3.5 million by a jury this week after an emergency room (ER) physician reportedly failed to diagnose Smith’s stroke in time, leading to her death, the Staunton News Leader has reported.
The lawsuit, filed against Antonio Baca, MD, accused the doctor of not conducting the proper testing, within the proper time frame, on Smith. After a CT scan failed to clear her, Baca ordered Smith an MRI to rule out cerebrovascular damage—an exam that was supposedly ready within 10 minutes but wasn’t completed for an hour.
Smith was admitted to a hospital shortly after receiving results from her MRI, and standard stroke protocol was followed. Still, four days after she’d first entered the ER, she died at Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center in Richmond.
“Obviously, we’re very pleased,” Frank Hilton, an attorney for the Smiths, told the News Leader. “The family suffered a great deal.”
Read more about the case at this link:
After graduating from Indiana University-Bloomington with a bachelor’s in journalism, Anicka joined TriMed’s Chicago team in 2017 covering cardiology. Close to her heart is long-form journalism, Pilot G-2 pens, dark chocolate and her dog Harper Lee.