Woman Got Brain Surgery By Mistake, Family Won’t Get $20M Award

BELLEVILLE, MI — The family of a Belleville, Michigan, woman who died in 2012 after undergoing brain surgery by mistake at a Dearborn hospital won’t see a penny of a jury’ $20 million award. The Michigan Supreme Court last week declined to intervene and reverse an appeals court decision voiding the jury’s 2015 award, one of the largest in the state’s history.

Bimla Nayyar, 81, was admitted to Oakwood Healthcare’s Dearborn hospital in January 2012 for a routine jaw realignment. But due to an extraordinary blunder and records mix-up, she underwent the unnecessary brain surgery and spent 60 days on life support before she died.

Her estate’s attorney, Geoffrey Fieger called the procedure she should have had “something that can be done in a dentist’s chair.”

“Instead,” Fieger said at the time, “they took off the right side of her head, and killed her.”

In 2016, the Michigan Appeals Court overturned the verdict against Oakwood, now Beaumont Hospital – Dearborn, on technical grounds. The court decided in the hospital’s favor, finding that Wayne County Circuit Judge Sheila Gibson allowed the jury to consider damages based on ordinary negligence — which the first two judges overseeing the lawsuit had ruled out — rather than medical malpractice. Medical malpractice awards are strictly capped under tort reform passed in the 1990s.

The hospital admitted it made an egregious mistake, Fieger and his co-counsel said in a filing urging the Supreme Court to take the case, The Associated Press reported.

“This court would have to suspend all concepts of fair play, justice and truth to ignore the gross injustice that has occurred here,” they wrote. “For God’s sake, do something about it.”

Oakwood’s lawyers said Fieger had been in error when he made an “all or nothing … bad bet” on a negligence claim.

Though the Supreme Court declined to intervene — for a second time — Chief Justice Stephen Markman said the case was a “medical and legal dereliction, resulting in an extraordinary miscarriage of justice.”

Markman wrote that the Nayyar family “now has no negligence claim and no medical malpractice claim, all despite the fact that (a) defendant-hospital openly admitted negligence, (b) a jury determined that this negligence constituted the proximate cause of plaintiff’s death, and (c) a jury awarded plaintiff a $20 million verdict. …

“Yet the decedent’s husband’s plaintive inquiry nonetheless resonates loudly: ‘How is [this] possible in a just and fair world . . . ?’ There is no satisfactory answer, in my judgment, only that further review of this matter might well be pursued in an appropriate action.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Photo courtesy of Fieger, Fieger, Kenney & Harrington P.C