When you put a 74-year-old woman’s powerful sleeping pills into the wrong bottle bad things happen.
The unfortunate woman in this case inadvertently overdosed on Ambien, which she thought was prednisone, became woozy then, as her attorney puts it, lost her balance and fell “down onto her rear end.”
David Yarborough of Yarborough Applegate in Charleston said the prescription snafu and resulting fall left his client with an excruciatingly painful fractured sacrum, a triangular shaped bone that connects the bottom of the spine to the tailbone.
The pain was so intense that her doctors decided to implant a device called a spinal cord stimulator in an attempt to ease her suffering with the use of electric pulses and signals, Yarborough added.
The client, whom Applegate described as a classic “eggshell plaintiff” because of her brittle bones and history of chronic back pain and spinal surgeries prior to her fall, ended up settling her case against the pharmacy in question for $700,000 earlier this year.
Citing a confidentiality agreement, Yarborough would not identify the client, whom he called Suzanne Doe, and the pharmacy, which he described as a major chain.
“This particular pharmacy had come in and taken over an independent small town pharmacy,” he said.
The new owner kept the same pharmacist, but ramped up his goals, requiring him to fill some 400 prescriptions a day – four times as many as he was filling before the takeover, according to Yarborough.
The pharmacist had initially denied that he made the mistake because he was being overworked. But he changed his tune and became the plaintiff’s star witness after being confronted with the fact that he was written up four times in six months for failing to fill prescriptions fast enough, Yarborough said. Those reprimands occurred before the prescription mix up.
“He then testified that he was under a tremendous amount of pressure from corporate,” Yarborough said. “He said that they put production and profits over safety, that they violated the standard of care and safety rules for filling prescriptions.”
Yarborough was not aware of any other similar mistakes occurring at the pharmacy, which he said attempted to minimize its liability by contending that the pharmacist had simply made a mistake.
“Their whole defense was about damages and the fact that they believed her injuries were minor and that she would have needed to have the spinal cord stimulator anyway,” he said.
His client’s medical bills totaled $185,000. The remaining $515,000 of the settlement is compensation for her pain and suffering.
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NEGLIGENCE – MISFILLED PRESCRIPTION
Case name: Suzanne Doe v. Anonymous Major Pharmacy Chain
Court: Withheld
Date of settlement: Jan. 29
Amount: $700,000
Attorney for plaintiff: David Yarborough of Yarborough Applegate (Charleston)
Attorney for defendant: Withheld