A widow’s habit of taking notes to keep track of daily life has paid off.
A St. Louis jury awarded Lisa Stephens and her deceased husband's two adult children $5.008 million, which includes $2 million in both past and future noneconomic damages, $434,000 in past economic damages, and $574,000 in future economic damages, according to media reports.
“She's a note taker, and that's just who she is,” said Stephens’ attorney Morgan Murphy of the Zevan Davidson Roman law firm in St. Louis. “She takes notes of every conversation all the time. It's how she processes things. When she writes it down, she remembers it better.”
Murphy
| Courtesy photo
Stephens’ late husband, McKinley, was only 58 years old when he died in 2019 of a blood clot that had gone undiagnosed following sleep apnea surgery at Saint Louis University’s SLUCare.
But because of tort reform laws in Missouri that apply to cases against medical providers, the $5.008 million jury verdict will be reduced to a $1,543,671 judgment with 40 percent going toward attorney fees, according to Murphy.
"I hope the message this verdict sends is that doctors need to be held accountable to their patients," she said. "Doctors and medical systems are responsible for system failures."
As previously reported in Missouri Lawyers Media, the deceased police officer’s symptoms included leg swelling, right calf pain, shortness of breath, tenderness, and not feeling well.
“His wife is not the doctor,” Murphy told the St. Louis Record. “It's not her job to write down everything that the doctor is saying. The doctors are supposed to document the important events that occur during a medical appointment, and they're supposed to document the advice they give their patients, especially since he was at risk for death if he didn't get this test done within 24 hours.”
The fact that Stephens could not locate in her notes advice from physicians that her husband should be tested within 24 hours contributed to the jury deciding in her favor, according to Murphy.
“They were presented in court but none of the notes, and there were a lot of them, said: ‘Get this test done within 24 hours’,” she said.
The medical center’s electronic record system documented that a leg ultrasound called a venous duplex test was needed but it had not been scheduled prior to the Stephens' departure.
“The average person understands that it's very complicated to navigate medical scheduling,” Murphy added. “I felt pretty confident that if we took this case to a jury, they were not going to believe St. Louis University's story in terms of them telling McKinley and his wife that they wanted this test done within 24 hours. I also felt the jury wouldn’t let them off the hook for not scheduling something they thought was urgent.”