Jury awards $7.4 million in medical case

SANDUSKY — An Erie County jury awarded nearly $7.4 million in damages Tuesday against two local doctors blamed for a Vermilion woman's permanent brain damage.The medical malpractice verdict is one of the largest in a civil trial in Erie County history. Erie County Common Pleas Judge Tygh Tone, who has been on the bench for 14 years, said it's the largest verdict ever reached inside his courtroom.Marlyn Day, 81, who now lives in a Vermilion nursing home, is incapacitated and suffered brain damage after doctors allegedly failed to realize in time that she had a brain infection.The verdict was reached against two local neurologists, Dr. Khaled A. Yassine and Dr. Nicole Barylski-Danner, and against their practice, Advanced Neurologic Associates Inc.The jury awarded $7,380,000 in damages to the plaintiffs, which include Day's guardian, Sean Moorehead, and her husband, Bob Day. The jury apportioned 60 percent of the blame to Yassine and 40 percent to Barylski-Danner.The jury, six women and two men, deliberated for about four hours over two days before reaching a verdict about noon Tuesday. They left the courtroom after declining to speak to a reporter.The attorneys for the two doctors, R. Mark Jones and Eric S. Faulkner of Cleveland's Roetzel & Andress law firm, also had no comment and would not say if they planned an appeal.Tone said he believes it's likely they'll file an appeal with the Sixth District Court of Appeals in Cleveland. The defense has 30 days to appeal the judgment, he said.Toledo attorney Chad Tuschman, who represents the Days with his partner, Peter DeClark, said afterward that the verdict likely will mean the same mistake that hurt his client won't be made on anyone else."This is to never happen again," Tuschman said. "This is for your community there. It is sending a very strong message.""This jury was magnificent," said Tuschman, who said the jurors appeared to pay close attention to detail.The original lawsuit had named Firelands Regional Medical Center and other providers, but all of the other defendants had been dismissed by the time the case went to trial in Tone's third floor courtroom at the Erie County Courthouse."This was all on the neurologists," Tuschman said. "The correct speciality was called in and they did nothing."Marlyn Day was 76 when she was admitted to Firelands on Oct. 28, 2013, suffering from confusion and leg weakness. She had previously turned up at the hospital's emergency room on Oct. 3, 2013, with a chronic cough, and an X-ray showed a suspected mass in her lungs, possibly due to lung cancer, the plaintiff's trial brief says.Day was admitted to the hospital, and an MRI showed lesions consistent with either an abscess caused by a brain infection or by cancer possibly spread from the lungs.Day's attorneys allege that although there were hallmarks of a brain abscess, doctors ignored that possibility and focused on possible lung cancer.Expert testimony from doctors brought in by the plaintiffs established that when a brain infection was suspected, the neurologists should have immediately ordered antibiotics, Tuschman said."Nobody denied that," Tuschman said.The defendants' trial brief says that Marlyn Day's history included smoking more than two packs of cigarettes a day for 50 years and defends the doctors' judgments as reasonable.When Day came to the hospital on Oct. 28, 2013, she did not have fever or other symptoms of an infection, her white blood cell count was normal and blood samples did not reveal an infection, the defendants said. Other doctors who handled the case did not order antibiotics either, the brief says.Marlyn Day, now permanently living in a nursing home, cannot use her left arm or her legs, cannot control some of her bodily functions, has limited mental capacity, is confined to a wheelchair and cannot care for herself, according to plaintiff attorneys.Although the $7.4 million verdict is a large one, it's topped by a 1987 verdict of $15.3 million that attorney Dennis Murray Sr. won in the Eugene Leber accidental shooting case, said Margaret Murray, an attorney at the Murray and Murray law firm in downtown Sandusky. Leber was accidentally shot in 1979, spawning a long court case. There were several verdicts in the Leber case, but the 1987 one was the largest, said Murray, who did some quick research when the Register called."We have a board in plexiglass with Sandusky Register articles," she said. "We went into his office and looked at the board."Reach reporter Tom Jackson at jackson@sanduskyregister.com and follow him on Twitter @jacksontom.Attorney Chad TuschmanBob Day, the husband of Marlyn Day, moments after Tuesday's verdict.