Jan 8, 2009 11:00 pm US/Eastern
Health: ER Issues
PHILADELPHIA (CBS 3) ―
In a medical emergency, you turn to the ER, where doctors are supposed to figure out what's wrong, but it doesn't always work out that way.
Just to stand up is an ordeal for 24-year-old Yanira Montanez. She has to depend on her mother and 4-year-old daughter for everything in their North Philly home.
"It hard ya know even to think about it," said her mother, Iris.
Iris Soto is devastated. Her daughter had so many hopes and dreams.
"See how happy she was in those pictures," said Iris.
Four years ago, Yanira was thrilled with her newborn baby and celebrating with the family. Now she is brain damaged, paralyzed and blind. She won't be able to watch her daughter grow up.
"You're my sweetheart and baby for ever and ever," Yanira tells her daughter.
Her tragic story started with crushing headaches, some numbness in her face and nausea. She went to two Philadelphia emergency rooms 3 times in 3 days.
"They just kept sending me back home," Yanira told us.
Initial hospital tests showed Yanira was pregnant with her second child. Doctors figured that was causing her symptoms. What doctors missed was a tumor. It was growing and killing brain tissue.
Four days after that first trip to the ER, the brain swelling caused Yanira to pass out and fall down a flight of stairs.
"They should have done a cat scan. Any first year medical student knows that what she had was neurological in nature," said Lawyer Kenneth Rothweiler.
Rothweiler says Yanira wasn't given the proper tests, a brain scan, because she's poor and on Medicaid.
"The people that get the worst care are the people with the worst insurance," said Rothweiler.
He says she was the victim of a new kind of medical discrimination. However the judge in the malpractice trial rejected that claim, and said there was no evidence of discrimination.
Yanira's pregnancy didn't last, but the consequences of the missed brain tumor will be with her forever.
"She would have been alright if they would have done the right thing for her," Iris contends.
A jury awarded the family $11 million deciding that doctors with Temple Health Systems, which owned the hospitals where Yanira was treated, were negligent.
Temple issued a statement that says, in part:
"Temple provides more than $100 million in free and under-reimbursed care each year and to suggest that medically necessary care was withheld because of insurance status is an insult to the communities served by Temple."
Temple appealed the verdict, but then settled the case with the family out of court for an undisclosed sum.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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