Valley woman’s case highlights medical malpractice debate

Molly Ball

Monday, Feb. 7, 2005 | 11:11 a.m.

Four years ago, Dianne Meyer was working as an usher at Cirque du Soleil's "O." She called it her "little senior job," and she loved the chance it gave her to stay active and mingle with a glamorous crowd.

After work one night, she went home and went to bed, only to wake up within hours with a stabbing pain in her right side.

She never dreamed it was the beginning of a horrific ordeal -- that a month and a half later she would wake up in a hospital bed, confused and unable to speak, and realize that both her legs had been cut off below the knees.

Meyer says she was the victim of a medical mistake that should not have happened, and she says people like her, not bickering doctors and lawyers, should be at the center of the debate over medical malpractice lawsuits.

Today, Meyer and her husband will travel to Washington, D.C., to join about 50 other victims and family members who have been hurt by medical negligence. They will appear at several events on Tuesday and Wednesday sponsored by the New York-based Center for Justice and Democracy, a consumer-rights and anti-tort-reform group, to lobby against proposed federal legislation, backed by President Bush, that would limit malpractice lawsuits.

Bush, doctors and other proponents of the limits say the limits are needed to keep medical costs manageable and to keep enough doctors in the profession. Opponents point to cases like Meyer's when they argue that only a jury of one's peers, after hearing the facts of a case, can properly decide the price of justice.

The size of Meyer's kidney stone -- it was nearly an inch long -- was visible in the X-rays taken during her first emergency room visit. Already, her body was being poisoned from within. Yet she was sent home with pain medication.

Meyer's husband took her to the emergency room again when she failed to get better. Sometime during her eight hours in the waiting room on that day in November 2000, she says, she lost consciousness.

When she awoke from her coma, it was mid-February.

"How can you go from having a kidney stone to having no legs? I didn't understand," Meyer, 61, said. "I was searching for answers."

Meyer said that when she began to come out of her coma and started to comprehend that her legs were gone, she had a strong urge to tell her family -- her husband, two children and four grandchildren.

"As soon as I could talk, I just wanted to tell them," she said. "But they already knew."

She gradually learned that the immense kidney stone, which she says doctors told her was two tiny stones, had been too big for her body to pass. She developed sepsis, also known as blood poisoning, and her family gave doctors the go-ahead to cut off her legs.

The lobbying trip to Washington will not be an easy one -- getting through airport security with two prosthetic legs and a cane is a major chore. But it is not a new battle for Meyer, who spoke several times before the Nevada Legislature when it convened a special session to examine the issue in 2002.

Meyer and her allies lost that battle, and they lost again in November, when Nevada voters approved some of the nation's strictest limits on malpractice liability in the form of Question 3 on the ballot.

That initiative set a no-exceptions ceiling of $350,000 on "pain and suffering" damages in malpractice lawsuits and limited attorneys' fees. The proposed federal law would lower the roof still further, to $250,000, nationwide.

Those who backed the Nevada initiative say people like Meyer were not its target.

"I think anybody who has truly suffered malpractice should be able to be compensated as much as possible," said Dr. Michael Coletti, president of the Clark County Medical Society. "But you have so many people claiming malpractice that it makes it difficult for the patients who are truly injured to get compensation."

Coletti said everybody knows that there are "too many frivolous lawsuits."

"People are doing it like a lottery game," he said. "We have legalized extortion and blackmail in our courts."

But victims' advocates say so-called frivolous lawsuits are a myth. Las Vegas plaintiffs' attorney Gerald Gillock, whose firm represents Meyer, said her case was far from the worst he had seen.

"I have a case right now where a baby's heart was punctured during amniocentesis," the routine procedure in which a needle is inserted into a pregnant woman's womb, Gillock said.

"The doctor sent her next door, and the baby bled to death internally before they could deliver it. I have someone whose heart was lacerated while they were getting an angiogram. I have a doctor who administered a large dose of morphine without doing routine neurological testing, and the patient died. I have people who have gone blind or lost their fingers because they were prescribed the wrong medication."

The crisis in medical malpractice, Gillock and his allies say, is medical malpractice.

An often-cited study published in 2000 by the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Science concluded that as many as 98,000 people die each year because of medical mistakes in hospitals alone.

"What would the general public do if lawyers were killing 100,000 people every year?" Gillock said. "Would we say we need to give them additional protection?"

Laurie Beacham, spokeswoman for the Center for Justice and Democracy, said doctors are right to complain about their excessively high insurance rates, but the culprit is not sue-happy patients with specious claims.

"It's an insurance industry issue," Beacham said. "There needs to be more scrutiny and regulation of the insurance industry." The many states that have enacted liability caps have not seen doctors' insurance rates go down as a result, she said.

"The insurance companies need to open their books," she said. "It's not fair to blame the patients and innocent victims of medical malpractice."

The insurance industry disputes that argument, pointing out that nationally, many malpractice insurers are government-run or nonprofit doctors' cooperatives. That is the case in Nevada, where the majority of doctors are insured by either the Medical Liability Association of Nevada -- run by the state -- or Nevada Mutual, a co-op of doctors insuring themselves.

"These companies don't have stockholders in New York," said James Wadhams, a Nevada attorney and insurance industry lobbyist. "When it's doctors charging themselves for insurance in a co-op, it doesn't make sense to blame the insurance industry for high premiums."

Major national and international for-profit insurers such as State Farm refuse to write malpractice insurance because they can't make money at it, Wadhams said. And the reason for that, he said, is the rising cost of malpractice lawsuits.

Dianne Meyer has reached a settlement with one doctor but not with the hospital, Summerlin Hospital Medical Center. In its court response, the hospital denies the allegations in Meyer's lawsuit.

Her care, she says, has cost her insurance company almost $1 million, which by law must be taken out of any settlement money. She will need new prosthetics every few years, and a more sophisticated wheelchair if she grows frailer. And she will never get her legs back.

Meyer says she just wants to hold someone accountable.

"When you are injured and you want to stand up for yourself and make sure it doesn't happen to somebody else, you're labeled as frivolous and greedy," she said.

"I've had people ask me, 'How much are your legs worth?' And I say, 'How much would I have to pay you to cut off your legs?' "

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