NJ woman brain damaged after giving birth

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York

Blood arrived too late for transfusion – Jury awards $22 million

Ana Gomez went to the hospital to have a baby. She emerged with a healthy baby girl but, due to a staffing error that could have been easily avoided, she suffered a severe brain injury that left her unable to care for herself or her child.

A New Jersey Superior Court jury awarded $22 million in the case against Atlantic City Medical Center and the doctor in charge of its blood bank, which took more than an hour to get blood to Gomez after she suffered hemorrhaging in her uterus after giving birth. The case, in which Gomez was represented by Kline & Specter attorney Jonathan Cohen, was the largest personal injury verdict in New Jersey for 2003 as catalogued by the New Jersey Law Journal.

Gomez, of Absecon, an El Salvadoran immigrant who was 30 years old at the time of the 1998 incident, had lost half her blood and suffered cardiac arrest while awaiting a transfusion. Despite six months of rehabilitation, she remained confined to a wheelchair and unable to feed or bathe herself.