EL&C Trial Attorneys

Jury Gives $4,000,000 to Victim of Stroke Caused by Headache Misdiagnosis

Foster v. Falk: A Middlesex County jury awarded a $4 million on Feb. 4 t a woman found to have suffered a brain-damaging stroke because doctors failed to order tests for her headaches.

Over seven days in June 1996, Carlene Foster, now 50, complained of headaches and vomiting to three doctors at HIP of New Jersey in Edison and to an emergency room doctor at J.F.K. Medical Center, and on June 12, she suffered a stroke. The jury found each doctor 25 percent liable, says her lawyers, William Crutchlow and William Levinson of Edison’s EICHEN LEVINSON & CRUTCHLOW LLP.

Superior Court Judge Yolanda Ciccone presided at trial. Foster’s expert testified that a CAT scan, which would have shown pre-aneurysm bleeding, should have been attributed to migraine headaches and that the doctors did not deviate from standards of care by not ordering a CAT scan, Foster’s lawyers say.

The doctors and their lawyers are David Falk, represented by John Orlovsky of Orlovsky, Moody, Schaaff & Gabrysiak in West Long Branch; Nancy Somer, represented by Thomas Pyle of Roseland ’s Post, Polak, Goodsell, MacNeill & Strauchler; Jeffrey Rosen, represented by Donald Grasso of Orlovsky, Grasso, Bolger, Mensching, Halpin & Daley in Toms River; and Angelo Racaniello, represented by Peter Gordon of Krompier & Gordon in Parsippany.

Pyle confirms the size of the verdict but declines to comment on whether there will be an appeal.