Imagine that you’re on dialysis and the power goes out?

(That’s precisely what happened to our client’s mother in rural Tennessee – and she died as a result.)

What happens next depends upon whether the dialysis center has invested in a backup generator, which costs pennies per treatment over the years it’s in use. If you’re lucky, the dialysis center has a backup generator that’s been properly maintained, and the dialysis machine can continue doing its job without interruption, safely returning blood to your body. If you’re not that lucky, and there’s no backup generator, the blood will have to be hand-cranked back into your body. If there’s sufficient staff on hand, they’ll do it for you. But if there isn’t, you may have to crank it back on your own. Of course, this requires special training and practice.

In this case, our witnesses – nephrology/dialysis experts from two major medical universities – testified that the cause of our client’s death was an air embolism, and that the embolism must have been the result of human error. After hours of questioning, Dr. Nudelman was able to get the center’s expert to admit under oath that the center had no backup generator simply because they didn’t want to spend the money.

Q: What's the medical reason for not having a backup generator?

A: There's not a medical reason, sir.

Q: Well, if not medical, what reason would there be?

A: There would be an economic reason, sir. We don't have endless funds to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a generator, something that's used extremely infrequently. We have priorities on how we spend money…”

This case went to trial in Tennessee. After two weeks of litigation, on the morning the case was scheduled to go to the jury, the case was settled very favorably for the family.