$5,750,000 verdict on behalf of a 20-year-old woman who was discharged from the hospital after giving birth to her second son, even though she had a very aggressive infection in her uterus and abdomen.

This 20-year-old woman had a normal pregnancy and a normal delivery. That night, she started feeling pain. The next morning, while outside for a cigarette, she almost passed out and had to be wheeled back to bed in a wheelchair. The covering doctor for the group prescribed IV fluids for her. Throughout that day and into the next, she continued to have increasing levels of abdominal pain, a high heart rate, and increasingly more vital pain medication until they were giving her narcotics like morphine.

She was discharged the following morning, even though her nurse wrote in the hospital record that there were no normal bowel sounds after listening for 5 minutes! It was clear that the doctors never read the nursing notes on the computer. The doctor’s notes were all handwritten, not entered into the computer.

By the next day, she was in such pain that she was only partly conscious. Her husband brought her back to the doctor’s office, and they wheeled her directly to the hospital emergency room. It was clear by then that her infection had taken over most of her body. She was transferred to a high-level teaching hospital and had emergency surgery to remove the grossly infected uterus and both ovaries, and she had a colostomy. The colostomy was reversed a few months later. However, she wasn’t able to take hormone replacement therapy because she developed a blood clot that almost killed her. This 20-year-old married woman will spend the rest of her life in menopause.