Beating Goliath – Season 4, Episode 1 – Part 1: “It was like a Nightmare”

Transcript

[00:00:04.56] - Marcy Mangan
From the Chicagoland law firm of Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard, this is Beating Goliath: A Plaintiff's Pursuit of Justice. Case #4, Part 1: Billy Fern v. Central DuPage Emergency Physicians et al. In 2014, Billy Fern was a 25-year-old man who was excited about his career path and loved being active outdoors. He was faced with some health issues that required medication. That summer, Billy went to an Illinois urgent care center with complaints of foot pain. Little did he know, in just a few short weeks, he would lose his foot. Billy's life would never be the same from that moment forward, and it's all because his doctors failed to take his concerns seriously. This is the story of what led to his amputation. During this podcast, you'll also hear how Billy overcame a horrific injury, both physically and mentally, and how a team of attorneys from Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard were able to help him on his journey to justice.

[00:01:08.22] - Laurel Fern
My name is Laurel Fern. I'm Billy Fern's mom. Billy is a quiet, intelligent person. I think one of my favorite things about Billy is his sense of humor.

[00:01:18.59] - William Fern
My name is William Fern. I'm Billy's dad. He's always been interested in a variety of different things, even as a little guy. When he is exposed to a new topic that he's interested in, he He completely immerses himself in it.

[00:01:32.08] - Laurel Fern
He likes to walk the dog. He likes to garden. He likes to cook. He reads.

[00:01:37.02] - William Fern
He does things in a routine, but he does them with an exuberance. He's the kind of guy, if you go with him to a museum or an arboretum or a botanical garden, he wants to see every single thing. So plan on being there for the whole day.

[00:01:53.08] - Marcy Mangan
When you speak to them, it's clear Bill and Laurel Fern think the world of their son Billy.

[00:01:58.12] - William Fern
Our family is pretty close. We have a pretty good relationship with each other.

[00:02:03.44] - Marcy Mangan
The Ferns value quality time as a family. Prior to June 2014, one of their favorite family traditions was exploring new places together.

[00:02:12.03] - William Fern
We travel quite a bit, mostly in the country, but we've been to some of the Caribbean islands and South America.

[00:02:19.22] - Laurel Fern
We like to go on vacation usually once a year.

[00:02:23.07] - Marcy Mangan
But just over 10 years ago, the Ferns were faced with the possibility that they may never be able to travel the world like they used to.

[00:02:29.37] - Laurel Fern
Billy was 25 when his foot started hurting in June of 2014.

[00:02:34.40] - Marcy Mangan
Billy had been on a regimen of blood thinners for about 6 months before he was diagnosed with pulmonary embolism, a condition where arteries in the lungs become blocked by a blood clot. As part of his treatment plan, he stopped taking the blood thinners in June, and about a week later, his foot pain began.

[00:02:51.14] - Laurel Fern
After a couple days, it got so painful that he could barely put any weight on it. So my husband took him to urgent care, who then said, "No, we can't treat this.

[00:03:00.23] - Marcy Mangan
You need to go to the ER." At Central DuPage Hospital's ER, Billy saw a doctor who used a venous Doppler ultrasound to rule out venous occlusion, or where a vein becomes blocked or pinched. Billy was discharged with a pain medication for treatment of limb pain, but no real diagnosis. He was told to follow up with a primary care physician the next day.

[00:03:20.36] - Laurel Fern
All the ER doctor did was rule out that there were no venous blood clots. He couldn't give us any suggestions as to why his foot hurt so much. We followed his directions, but we felt that there was more to be explored at that point because we didn't get any answers on why his foot hurt so much.

[00:03:41.59] - William Fern
He was sort of dismissive of the whole thing. The disappointing thing with the emergency room is the doctor checked him, came up with no medical prognosis. They just sent us home. They were just like kind of dismissing it.

[00:03:55.32] - Marcy Mangan
The following day, Billy visited a family medicine physician with still worsening foot pain. Despite his repeated denial of recent trauma or any type of injury to the foot, the doctor ordered an X-ray, which didn't show anything concerning.

[00:04:08.57] - Laurel Fern
Thursday, he went back to that general physician who then said, "You should go see an orthopedic doctor." So the next day, we did take him to an orthopedic doctor. Who basically looked at it and said, "No, you've got to go to the hospital." So we took him to the hospital. He was admitted. They did another venous Doppler, which did find a blood clot. So they said, "Okay, we're going to put you on blood thinners," you know, and that was pretty much the end of it until I started complaining, saying his foot shouldn't be hurting this much just from one blood clot.

[00:04:40.01] - William Fern
At that point, his foot pain had continued to increase each day. It actually had switched over into like numbness on some of the toes. And he was also indicating a red spot on the top of his foot. It was sort of feeling like my foot was falling asleep.

[00:04:56.17] - Marcy Mangan
Billy was eventually sent to the hospital by an orthopedic surgeon. By 7 PM that evening, his foot became cool to the touch and a vascular surgeon was called in to perform tests, which revealed arterial occlusion.

[00:05:08.57] - Laurel Fern
They found hundreds of blood clots in there that had been cutting off the blood flow to his right foot.

[00:05:13.50] - Marcy Mangan
Due to the alarming number of clots found in Billy's leg, Billy required an emergent surgery which lasted almost 8 hours.

[00:05:21.03] - William Fern
What we thought was gonna be a routine surgery started stretching out longer in hours.

[00:05:27.05] - Laurel Fern
At some point they took us into this special room away from the other people, and that's when we started to catch on, well, this is like way more serious than, than we ever thought. We really went into that surgery without realizing just how precarious that situation was. He had even warned us he could even die on the table.

[00:05:46.20] - William Fern
At the conclusion, he told us he got as many as he could. He said at this point he's hopeful that he got enough to reestablish circulation, but it's going to be a wait and see. So we went home thinking that, you know, maybe the problem was solved and after his recovery that he would be good again.

[00:06:03.53] - Marcy Mangan
After the surgery, Billy was placed in an intensive care unit for 3 weeks.

[00:06:08.47] - Laurel Fern
Over the course of that 3 weeks, we were optimistic that his foot would come back to life, but instead it just slowly turned purple and we couldn't get a pulse in it.

[00:06:19.55] - William Fern
I was still in a lot of pain and my foot was getting worse. It hurt all the time. There wasn't any relief for the problems I was having from the surgery on the foot. My foot kept getting worse and I was no longer able to move it.

[00:06:33.32] - Marcy Mangan
At the end of those 3 weeks, a doctor advised Billy's parents to take him home.

[00:06:37.42] - William Fern
He thought the change of environment might be better for him.

[00:06:41.37] - Laurel Fern
That's when he was first started to insinuate that the foot might have to go.

[00:06:46.07] - William Fern
I was hopeful that I would possibly only lose like some, like a toes at first. That was only real hope I had there.

[00:06:56.14] - Marcy Mangan
When Billy arrived home, his foot condition became even worse. He returned to the doctor who said it was likely time for an amputation.

[00:07:03.31] - Laurel Fern
It was horrifying. And he said, but of course you should get a second opinion. So we did in the hopes that maybe he won't lose his foot. So we went to the University of Chicago and the doctor looked at it and he said, no, I want to take it off right now. He says, because this is like life-threatening. It could poison the rest of your body. It could travel up your leg. We weren't ready, especially Billy wasn't ready because even though he had been told that it was a possibility, It was never real. So we said, no, just give us a night. And then so we went home, we thought about it, we got ready, and then we went back to the University of Chicago the next day. And they, they did first a partial and then got a plastic surgeon involved and did, did the full amputation.

[00:07:47.56] - William Fern
At this point, just being able to stay alive, that the amputation was just another critical phase. And his medical treatment because there's no turning back once the gangrene starts. And so I had already resolved the fact that, that something more was going to happen. And it was disappointing to actually hear him say it. It was devastating because everything I went through in the hospital, all the fighting I did to try to preserve the foot failed, and it came out to nothing in the end. So it would have to be removed anyway.

[00:08:20.52] - Laurel Fern
It was like a nightmare. You would just so much rather it be happening to you than your child.

[00:08:26.33] - Marcy Mangan
As Billy continued his recovery post-surgery, the Fern family quickly realized this preventable medical error would significantly impact all of their daily lives. As any mother would, Laurel, who is admittedly squeamish by nature, stepped into the role of caregiver.

[00:08:41.51] - Laurel Fern
I quit my job so that I could be with him and help take care of him. I went to him with the doctor visits. I filled his prescriptions and you know, set out his prescriptions because he was on like 10, 15 pills a day. I provided wound care on the stump site.

[00:08:58.52] - Marcy Mangan
For 6 months, Billy was at a doctor's office almost every day for treatment or therapy. During that time, Billy got an infection at the site of his amputation, which further delayed him being able to get a prosthetic.

[00:09:10.44] - William Fern
I had a bunch of complications with my wound, so I had like infections and it was took kind of a long time to heal.

[00:09:18.23] - Laurel Fern
We just kept hoping to get that prosthetic and we hoped that he could walk again.

[00:09:23.25] - William Fern
So I wanted to try to get back to my life and do what, what I could.

[00:09:29.25] - Marcy Mangan
The Ferns held on to hope that life would get a little easier once Billy received the prosthetic. But unfortunately, that just wasn't the case.

[00:09:37.11] - Laurel Fern
He went through many prosthetics. They all hurt. He gets maybe up to 6 hours a day wearing a prosthetic and then the pain gets so bad he has to take it off. And that's still to this day.

[00:09:49.18] - Marcy Mangan
Ultimately, Billy ended up finding a prosthetic that worked for him.

[00:09:53.01] - Laurel Fern
He ultimately ended up with kind of like the sports one, like with those bars that seems to work the best for him.

[00:09:59.01] - Marcy Mangan
While Billy was able to get around a little better once he received the prosthetic, he was still dealing with an immense amount of pain.

[00:10:05.41] - William Fern
The expectation was that he would get back on his feet and establish the new normal routine. No one forewarned us, or Billy specifically, that wearing a prosthetic is painful. The longer you wear it, the more it hurts. And the more movement that you affect where wearing it increases the pain once again. So the amount of time he could keep it on was really quite limited.

[00:10:31.27] - Marcy Mangan
As they watched their son continuously try to adapt to a new normal, Bill and Laurel became increasingly frustrated with the medical system and the lack of care that was shown to Billy.

[00:10:40.22] - William Fern
We thought it over and that we understood that he was done a disservice by the medical community. We decided that, well, we got to do something to get more people involved because this is going to be lifelong and he's not going to ever be a normal person again.

[00:10:56.58] - Laurel Fern
All along I was thinking, you know, they should have been doing more. If you do a Doppler, the veins and the arteries are right next to each other. There's no reason why they couldn't have just looked at the arteries too. And had they done that, I don't think he wouldn't have lost his foot. So I decided that I should get some advice from lawyers.

[00:11:14.47] - David Rashid
I'm David Rashid, and I'm a partner at Salvi, Shostak, and Pritchard. This case came to me when I was an attorney at my prior law firm. The facts of the case sounded promising for a potential case. It sounded to me like there were issues with both the emergency room care and also the family medicine care. Billy was clearly seeking out help for numerous countless days before anyone was able to make the diagnosis of an arterial occlusion. And so it sounded like this was a situation of, of tests missed or opportunities missed to solve his occlusion and to get it corrected before it resulted in the amputation.

[00:11:56.13] - Marcy Mangan
When the Ferns first met David, they immediately felt like they were in good hands.

[00:12:00.14] - William Fern
He was young and he was eager. You can tell he was, he was very interested. In Billy's case, he had done some homework before we'd even have gotten there. It was a pretty good first impression that he was going to do a good job for us.

[00:12:14.25] - Laurel Fern
I was impressed that he seemed super intelligent.

[00:12:18.37] - Marcy Mangan
David, who was just about 5 years out of law school when he met the Ferns in November of 2015, quickly took a liking to the family and was committed to seeking justice for Billy. His first task was to review the medical records to start building his case.

[00:12:32.19] - David Rashid
One of the things I learned from the records is that Billy had Asperger's syndrome. And, you know, that posed, as we would learn, it posed an obstacle to overcome in the case as the defendant made it sort of a centerpiece of the defense of the case. But when I met Billy and I met his parents for the first time, what I realized was that Billy was an intelligent, you know, accomplished young man, who, despite having Asperger's, was perfectly capable of speaking for himself.

[00:13:03.41] - Marcy Mangan
David recognized his opponents may try to use Billy's soft-spoken nature as a defense to claim they did no harm. But over the course of his meetings with the family, it was obvious that the Firms were all very credible witnesses, and his parents' protectiveness and involvement only strengthened the case.

[00:13:18.59] - David Rashid
It helps to have clients who are engaged. The recollections of Billy and his mom and his dad and ultimately the goals of all of them were so in unison and so in sync.

[00:13:30.05] - Marcy Mangan
In any lawsuit, one of the first things a good lawyer does is establish damages. One of the ways to establish damages is to paint a picture of who the plaintiff was and what they enjoyed doing before their injury.

[00:13:40.50] - David Rashid
He derived a lot of self-worth from his ability to do activities— canoeing, hiking, rollerblading, these long walks that he liked to go on.

[00:13:51.41] - Marcy Mangan
At the time of his injury, Billy was not only extremely physically active, he was also pursuing his professional goals. After graduation from Elmhurst University, Billy got an internship with the local government in Batavia, Illinois. After he completed his internship, he was offered a paid position with Batavia's municipal department.

[00:14:10.50] - William Fern
Right around the time he was finishing that up, he ended up contracting a pulmonary embolism of unknown origin and It hit him pretty hard. I was in pretty poor health at the end of 2013, so I went to work in the family company there as it was a more stable, like, environment to be in while I was trying to recover. So it was decided the sensible thing, as he was recovering, is that he would come and work for us because we could arrange his schedule around his recovery.

[00:14:41.29] - David Rashid
It gave them this opportunity to be with their son who they loved.

[00:14:45.05] - Marcy Mangan
David continued to build his case over the next few years. Being risk-averse people by nature, at any point in the process, David says Billy and his family would have agreed to a settlement if the option was there.

[00:14:56.14] - David Rashid
One of the things that I learned about Billy during the many years that the case was pending is that the process made Billy uncomfortable. He was a pretty risk-averse guy. At any sort of point in time, if there was the, the idea that he was going to be able to not get the case to trial, he was going to be able to get a settlement of some type, it was very much a relief. Him. But when it became apparent that that wasn't going to happen, he was steely and committed to seeing the process through because of the profound belief that he had been wronged and that an injustice had been done to him.

[00:15:27.09] - Marcy Mangan
And so, despite the process being stressful and uncertain, Billy and his family persisted in their pursuit of justice. But each time it felt like they were making progress towards a resolution, it seemed the universe had other plans.

[00:15:40.27] - Laurel Fern
It was all set for trial trial, and then COVID hit, and then the courts shut down.

[00:15:47.21] - Marcy Mangan
In our next episode, COVID delays within the courts and some other unforeseen curveballs continue to test the Fern family.

[00:15:53.57] - William Fern
We were concerned because we don't understand the system at all. And so we didn't know because of the time, energy, and expenses that had gone into the case on our behalf of up to that point.

[00:16:07.59] - Marcy Mangan
Tune in to episode 2 to find out if Billy's case makes it to trial. Special thanks to the Fern family for allowing us to share Billy's story. You can find more episodes of Beating Goliath on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. To learn more about this case and our firm, head to selvilaw.com/podcast.