This was a really, really nice young woman from the Southside of the city of Chicago who had a wonderful family. A couple small kids. Who had a husband who was very active in the neighborhood, he was also a Chicago fireman. And as I mentioned, she felt a mass in her left breast while pregnant. She saw a doctor promptly, as she should have. And the doctor advised her there wasn’t anything to concern herself with.

The appropriate thing to do would have been to have her come back after a set period of time to make sure that mass was either smaller or gone. That was never done. This poor woman then obviously was focusing on her pregnancy. And for several months, nearly a year, the mass was allowed to grow. It turned out to be a malignant mass that eventually took her life probably within a year of me filing the lawsuit, I don’t remember exactly. But it wasn’t long after the lawsuit was filed.

Thankfully, the defense lawyers recognized what a serious mistake had occurred. I got an extraordinary expert from one of the local institutions, one of the teaching hospitals who gave a compelling deposition describing exactly how poorly this woman’s medical management had been handled. And after the expert’s deposition, the defense lawyer grabbed me outside the hallway and said, “We want to settle this case.”
And because of the nature of the poor woman’s prognosis, we were able to effectuate a multimillion dollar structured settlement that actually paid the family significantly amounts over years so that they kind of had an income stream as the family went forward without the mother.