Expert medical opinion was that Katie’s birth injury could have and should have been prevented. It was discovered that the standard of care that is required when an emergency (stat) C-Section is called for is that the C-section must be performed within 30 minutes.

Everything during Betsy’s pregnancy was perfect. It was perfect half way through a routine non-stress test when Katie’s heart rate rapidly decelerated and the stat C-section was ordered by our obstetrician over the telephone.

Betsy was taken to the delivery room, prepped, anesthetized and then everything stopped. Someone in the delivery room arbitrarily decided to wait for our obstetrician to get to the hospital. In court this individual became the “mystery” doctor who was supposedly there, never signed any paperwork but ordered the resident doctor to stop the procedure. A wait that took over an hour from the time the C-section was ordered; a wait in which my daughter was being suffocated causing irreparable brain damage.

You cannot appreciate the emotion that just rethinking these events invokes unless you have been in this situation. What I would give to be able to have this hour back, to force this hospital staff to act like doctors in an emergency.

Prior to your court appearance the defense attorney’s will conduct depositions of your testimony. This means that they will come to your attorney’s office to question you on the record to hear your story. A court stenographer will be present to record every word. They will be looking for holes in your accounting of the events and anything else that they can use against you. They will act nice toward you but their intentions are anything but.

It seemed to me to be a cat and mouse game in which you weren’t given any rules and had to trust and to rely on the abilities of your attorney to protect you. I have never relied on anyone for anything. For me it was an uncomfortable situation, not being in control or knowing how the “game” is played. I continually wanted to resort to my natural tendency of anger and adversarial confrontation and hurt my opponents.

Our attorney is so astute that he knew my personality traits in our first meeting. We talked about how I had to control my emotions during questioning and he made helpful suggestions on techniques to do this. Your attorney will be there with you. He will be representing you and if he is like our attorney, he will protect you from certain lines of questioning or leading questions where the defense attorney’s are deliberately trying to set you up.

We met with two defense attorneys in the conference room at our attorney’s office. We were reassured that our attorney had everything under control and he tried to put us at ease. We had never really seen our attorney doing his job until now. I am convinced that there is no one or any situation that can intimidate this man. When the defense attorney’s began an inappropriate line of questioning with my wife, it erupted into a verbal street brawl with our attorney giving the one defense attorney a good spanking on points of law and professional courtesy; when it was over this defense attorney asked our attorney to please pull his “tentacles” back in.

I felt as though I had just witnessed a medieval joust and our attorney was still on his horse riding high.

After the discovery of facts, depositions and legal maneuvering you will get a court date that is many months in the future. You will find that the wheels of the court system turn very slowly and it is of particular importance that you get a “good” judge.

It was felt that we needed up to two weeks in trial to present all of the expert testimony. Given this time frame, our original court date would possibly push into the scheduled time of a judge’s convention at a resort and the judge that was to hear the case stated that if this happened he would just declare a mistrial so that he could go and enjoy himself at the convention and that was our problem.

It seemed to us that the arrogance of our judicial system is phenomenal. We found that judge’s have an attitude that this is their court, it’s their rules and if you don’t like it, too bad, try to vote them out and by bucking the system you are open to retaliation.

So we were forced to reschedule the court date for some six more months in the future. At this point we had been dealing with all of this for approximately 2 years and had not had our day in court.

Albeit slow, our court date did arrive. Our case was assigned to a judge that had never heard a malpractice case. Judge Horgos of Allegheny in Pennsylvania. He made it very clear that he was not to decide the case but was there to clarify points of law for the case and the jury would decide the case. He then proceeded to sleep, you read this correctly, sleep through hours of testimony as did his tipstaff yet eventually ruled that our obstetrician would be dismissed from the case leaving only the hospital liable on testimony that he never heard!

Imagine the message that this sends to a jury; a resounding “the doctor did nothing wrong”. After explaining that the jury was to decide, a judge with no experience in malpractice cases makes a major decision based upon testimony that he never heard because he was sleeping.

Our court system is a circus. It’s not about right and wrong, just or unjust, equality, blind justice or making victims whole again. For two weeks expert witnesses were paraded before the court to literally lie and distort facts into a framework that supported their case. I overheard someone state, “well they’ve had their whores testify, now the other whores will be in”. In short these expert witnesses will say whatever they are being paid to say no matter how ridiculous they sound. I watched horrified as a medical doctor from a renowned woman’s hospital in Pittsburgh contradicted and testified that he saw no decelerations on the fetal monitoring print out after no less than six other doctors from around the country on both sides in this court case testified that there were numerous and prolonged decelerations in Katie’s heart rate over a long period of time. He said in an arrogant manner exactly what the defense team was paying him to say and he refused to make any eye contact with either my wife or I as he sat with a smug look on his face.

The facts however were in black and white, they were irrefutable. The fetal monitoring strip showed severe fetal distress over a prolonged period of time. A stat C-section was ordered, documented and signed for but not performed.  To us this was a clear cut case.

In all court cases there are closed door sessions between the judge and attorneys in an effort to resolve the case faster. In one of the first meetings the judge told the defendants to offer us a million dollars so everyone could get out of here. Our attorney had to present this offer to settle to us even though he knew our response. So the trial continued.

Eventually my wife and I took the stand. The questioning was actually professional and direct without the trickery that I was expecting. During the case we actually became cordial with the hospitals defense attorney. My adversarial emotions had subsided and we found that he is a very nice person with a wife and son and lives across the street from a young girl that is living with a disability. After the case, he told us that this case was very different for him in that we had no hostility toward him.

As the case proceeded other troubling issues arose. As I was standing around the corner from where the jurors were seated during a break one of them said, “I have a niece in medical school and I don’t like to see this sort of thing”. We ran into one of the jurors at our credit union who was talking to others about the case. The hospital called a news conference that included a federal senator (Sen.Rick Santorum) to discuss how lawsuits were destroying it and a news paper article was published on the subject alluding to our case. The hospital was pulling out every stop to try to influence whoever they could. The jurors had to be questioned as to whether or not they saw the news by the judge. All of this outside media used by West Penn Hospital was designed to illegally influence the jury.

I am of the opinion that there are those individuals that seek to be on a jury to initiate their own agenda. They don’t care about what is right or wrong. They are there to get what they want for themselves.

We discussed these issues with our attorney and we all still believed that the black and white hard evidence could not be refuted. The hospital was obviously worried. The offer had gone substantially higher to settle. We discussed the offer with our attorney and he negotiated a “high-low” settlement offer. This type of settlement mitigates the risk for all parties involved. It avoids runaway jury awards of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for hospitals which get appealed and may not be settled for additional years and hedges against the injured party receiving nothing. The jury knew nothing about our settlement.

By the end of the case we were mentally exhausted and completely stressed.

The jury deliberated for two days. At the verdict the jury was split in favor of the hospital. We were in as much shock as the remaining defending attorney. We looked at each other, both of us stunned and he obviously more pleased than I. We were instructed to be professional and show no emotion upon the reading of the verdict. The jury was polled so that we could see how each member voted.

With the hard evidence being disregarded I will forever wonder what caused the jurors to decide the way that they did. Was it Judge Horgos sleeping, making this case appear to be unimportant and not worthy of his time, was it his dismissing the obstetrician from the trial on testimony that he never heard, was it certain persuasive jurors that had a bias against medical malpractice cases and their own personal agendas, was it the news media and the influence of a Federal Senator, did we make a bad impression with the jury, was it the amount of time it took for us to initiate the case, was it the anti trial lawyer propaganda that the American Medical Association produces, I will never know the answer to this question.

What I do know is that we entered this process to discover if Katie’s injury could have been prevented. We discovered through expert testimony that her outcome could have been substantially better if the hospital had performed the C-section immediately. We also wanted Katie to be compensated for an injury that we believed was the fault of the hospital.

Our attorney is a brilliant individual. His experience told him that it is very difficult to read a jury and to know what they are thinking. He spoke to us on this point several times throughout the trial. You never know for certain what will happen at the time of the verdict. We spoke of securing Katie’s future and what it would take to do that. Things such as housing, assistance in daily living and how we could provide a lifestyle for Katie where she would be happy for the rest of her life. He then approached the settlement negotiations with these things in mind. He secured Katie’s financial future and accomplished the goals that we set out on several years before, and for this we will always be thankful to him.