High six-figure settlement for cardiac death of 76-year-old man

A 76-year-old retired man was in a Pittsburgh hospital for heart bypass surgery, and the surgery went very well.  In the days following the surgery and while he was recuperating in the hospital, the man was routinely hooked up to a heart monitor.  Unfortunately, during one day the wires of the heart monitor became disconnected.  Normally, when that happens there is an alarm that goes off which the nurses hear, and they immediately re-attach the wires.  In this situation, however, the nurses had either turned off the alarm or they ignored it when it sounded and, as a result, the wires never got re-attached.  A short time later, the patient went into cardiac arrest but because the monitor was not attached, no one was aware he had suffered a cardiac arrest, and the patient ended up dying.

We filed a claim on behalf of the patient against this Pittsburgh hospital arguing that the nursing staff was at fault because they would have discovered that the wires from the heart monitor had become disconnected if they had the alarms on and were listening.  If the wires had been re-connected, they would have known immediately when the patient went into cardiac arrest, and they could have resuscitated him.  In support of our claim, we relied upon a medical expert known as a cardiologist, a doctor who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of heart disease.

At the time of his death, this man was not employed nor was he married, and he lived with his adult sons.  The main elements of damage that we claimed were the two sons’ loss of their loved one.  In legal terms, that is known as a “loss of consortium,” and it refers to the loss of a relationship between family members.  In this case, the two adult sons had lived with their father for several years and were quite close to him.  The high six-figure compensation payment went to those sons to compensate them for their loss.