CLEVELAND, Ohio – A Cuyahoga County jury Tuesday ordered the Cleveland Clinic to pay $7.6 million to a Gates Mills woman who was paralyzed after a back surgery.
The jury handed up the decision to Common Pleas Judge Emily Hagan following a two-week trial involving medical malpractice claims. In a statement, the Clinic said it respected the jury’s decision, “but we do not agree with the outcome and are evaluating our options.”
In documents, attorneys for Laurie Hance said she went to the Clinic for back issues. Dr. Iain Kalfas performed surgery on her Oct. 3, 2018, when she was 68. Her attorneys said in court records that the surgery caused paralysis from the waist down.
Hance suffered from a condition known as syringomyelia, which involves the presence of a fluid-filled cavity within her spinal cord. Kalfas recommended surgery to relieve the issue.
Hance’s attorneys, Charles Kampinski and Kristin Roberts, said in filings that Hance was extremely active, despite the back pain she had experienced. She bicycled, hiked, kayaked, swam and rode horses. After she scheduled her first surgery with Kalfas, she even went mountain climbing at Acadia National Park in Maine, according to the court records.
They said the surgeon told Hance that the surgery would “make her 95% better.” If the surgery did not work, her condition would be unchanged, the filings show.
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“The catastrophic effects of the surgery manifested immediately and dramatically as Laurie awakened from anesthesia,” the documents said. “The patient who had been wheeled into the operating room was a woman who had been fully capable of engaging in strenuous pursuits, despite her back discomfort; the woman who awoke from surgery was in excruciating, unrelenting pain and had effectively lost the use of her legs.”
Kampinski and Roberts claimed in filings that Kalfas and his surgical team made a series of errors, including allowing a foreign object to remain in her back after the surgery and failing to perform an MRI after the surgery to determine what was causing the compression on the spine. A second surgery came in February 2019, which the attorneys said left Hance in even greater pain.
“She walked in and never walked again,” Kampinski said. “Hopefully, this won’t ever happen to anyone else.”
In documents, attorneys for the Clinic stressed the surgery was not without risks. They said that Kalfas and other physicians met the standard of care in treating Hance and that “nothing [the doctors] did or failed to do proximately caused” the injury to Hance.
The Clinic’s statement said the jury rejected Hance’s claims for punitive damages, adding that “Dr. Kalfas is a well-respected and distinguished surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic.”
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