The 31-year-old woman was 13 weeks pregnant when her primary care physician palpated her thyroid during an office visit in November 2013 and believed that her thyroid was enlarged…medicalmalpracticelawyers.com, Delayed Diagnosis Of Thyroid Cancer Leads To Multi-Million-Dollar Malpractice Verdict, Nov 2024
The primary care physician ordered an ultrasound that was promptly performed that found five solid nodules in the patient’s right thyroid, ranging in size from 2 to 3 centimeters.
At the next visit with her primary care physician on November 14, 2013, he advised her of the results of the ultrasound and referred her to an endocrinologist. Her appointment with the endocrinologist was the following week at which time the endocrinologist advised her that her enlarged thyroid was benign and was related to her pregnancy. The endocrinologist did not advise her that the nodules could be cancer and he did not order a biopsy of the nodules. The endocrinologist was more concerned that she might develop hypothyroidism during her pregnancy and therefore told her to have blood work for TSH levels during the next one to two months.
In October 2014, the woman had a growth removed from her finger that was determined to be benign but the oncologist with whom she consulted referred her back to her endocrinologist after the oncologist found that she had enlarged cervical lymph nodes. She scheduled an appointment with the endocrinologist who then ordered fine needle aspiration biopsy that resulted in the diagnosis of Stage IV medullary thyroid cancer in December 2014.
The woman filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against her primary care physician and her endocrinologist, alleging that they both breached the standard of care and the such breaches caused a 13-month delay in diagnosing her thyroid cancer during which the cancer progressed from Stage III to Stage IV and reduced her ten-year survival rate to 10% from 85% to 90%. She had three cancer-related surgeries by the time of trial.
The jury determined that the endocrinologist breached the standard of care by failing to order or perform a fine needle biopsy in November 2013, by failing to have a plan in place to rule out thyroid cancer, by telling the woman that her enlarged thyroid was due to pregnancy, and by failing to tell her that she needed further evaluation of the thyroid nodules to rule out cancer.