Articles

Widow Awarded $6.15 Million

Wins suit against doctor and hospital in husband's death

By Marylynne Pitz
Post-Gazelle Staff Writer

An emergency room doctor's misdiagnosis of Charles D. Cypher's heart condition cost the Library man his life, a jury decided yesterday. The jurors in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court awarded $6.15 million in damages to his widow, Sherry A. Cypher.

Charles Cypher died the morning of May 24, 1995, about seven hours after leaving Jefferson Borough.

Cypher went in around 7 p.m. May 23 to Jefferson Hospital, where he complained of tightness in his chest and pain radiating down his left arm. During his four-hour stay, Dr. Febenido V. Pascua had Cypher undergo an electrocardiogram, a test that detects irregularities in 12 areas of the heart's electrical system.

He was discharged shortly after 11 p.m., given Motrin and told to put moist heat on his chest. Pascua diagnosed pleuritic chest pain. Around 5 a.m. the next morning, Sherry Cypher awoke to find her husband unconscious.

An ambulance returned him to Jefferson Hospital, where he died around 6:20 a.m.

Sherry Cypher filed a wrongful death suit against Pascua and South Hills Health System, which operates Jefferson Hospital, in March 1996. During a nine-day trial before Civil Division Judge Joan Orie Melvin, attorneys for Sherry Cypher argued that Pascua had failed to read and interpret her husband's electrocardiogram. Her attorneys, Phillip A. Ignelzi and Michael A. Murphy, contended that Pascua never looked at the electrocardiogram results before discharging her husband.

"Anybody reading this EKG never would have let the man go," Ignelzi said yesterday.

Dr. David Bregman, a cardiovascular surgeon from New York also testified for the plaintiff.

Bregman told jurors the electrocardiogram was abnormal and that anyone reading it would have put Charles Cypher in the hospital and onto a cardiac monitor.

A second expert, Dr. Mikel Rothenberg, an Ohio internist, testified that it was a "bells and whistles" EKG that signaled the need for immediate hospitalization.

Richard J. Federwicz, who defended the doctor and the hospital, also called an expert witness.

Dr. Bruce Waller, a cardiologist and pathologist from St. Vincent's Hospital in Indianapolis, testified that Cypher had a rare genetic condition that results in too much muscle mass in the heart's ventricle walls and septum.

Mary Cvetan, media relations' coordinator for Jefferson Hospital, said yesterday that no decision on an appeal had been made.