Medical negligence comes in many forms, but two of the most common are misdiagnosis and failure to diagnose. Often these errors are the result of miscommunication or lack of communication among hospital doctors and staff.
In cases of medical negligence at military and VA hospitals, the process for patients and families to sue the medical facility is different than the process for pursuing civil medical malpractice claims.
With that in mind, consider the case of a woman who is suing a VA medical center on behalf of her husband, who is now paralyzed from the waist down.
According to the suit, the husband’s condition deteriorated from self-sufficiency to paralysis over the course of 16 months.
The woman says that the VA medical center led her to believe that her husband was suffering the effects of a transient ischemic attack — commonly called a mini-stroke. However, comparison of two MRIs — one from 2014 and one from 2015 — showed that he had a tumor in his throat, and the two MRIs matched, according to the suit.
The trouble is that the tumor was not diagnosed as such in 2014 when the MRI revealed the growth, which has now reached the man’s spine, causing it to deteriorate.
According to the man’s wife, she already works two jobs, and now she has a third one: full-time caregiver for her husband.
Victims of military medical malpractice and their family members deserve full and fair compensation. To learn more about the process of holding VA medical facilities and military hospitals accountable, please see our recent post, “Steps for a Military Medical Malpractice Claim.”
