Oregon Injury Lawyer Blog

February 19, 2011

Oregon Brain Injuries Among Teens Continue to be a Serious Issue

A recent Oregonian story on young athletes and Oregon brain injuries focuses not only on the potential consequences of head injuries here in Oregon and elsewhere, but spotlights how seemingly minor incidents can lead to TBI. As the article notes: “Despite national campaigns and state laws to increase awareness about teenagers and concussions, victims… still struggle to find effective relief.”

The article focuses on a high school basketball player who wound up missing nearly two years on the court after “a stray ball bopped her on the head.” The incident seemed relatively minor at the time, but coming, as it did, shortly after another head injury (“a sharp knee to the head during a spirit-building game of tunnel tag,” as The Oregonian puts it) it was enough not only to sideline the teenage girl’s basketball career but also to launch her into a two year odyssey of headaches, lowered cognitive function and repeated rounds of treatment.

The girl, now 17, is finally back in school and was recently able to return to her high school basketball team, the paper reports. But her experience is a reminder of how difficult diagnosis and treatment of Portland brain injuries often is where younger athletes are concerned. This is especially worrisome since, as the paper notes, a CDC study found that “adolescents are more likely than adults to get a concussion and take longer to recover.”

February 15, 2011

Portland Hospital Death Raises More Questions Than Answers

by Matthew D. Kaplan

On its surface it is an Oregon wrongful death story so unbelievable it reads like the plot of a prime time police drama: a man feeling ill and heading for the hospital suffers a heart attack, crashes his car into a wall inside the hospital’s parking structure only steps from the emergency room entrance… then lies there, unconscious, for 20 minutes before anyone notices him. When summoned to the scene, the police attempt to revive him while sending another officer running into the emergency room for help – only to be told that hospital protocol requires the police to call 911 first and then wait for a dispatcher to give a formal order for the hospital’s own ambulance to pick up a patient lying only steps from the emergency room door, according to an account published in The Oregonian.

The heart attack victim, Birgilio Marin-Fuentes eventually made it into the emergency room, but was pronounced dead a short time later. The week since this Oregon hospital death has been marked by finger pointing between the police and the hospital, Portland Adventist, a threat from a U.S. congressman to investigate the hospital and seeming incomprehension throughout the city at how bureaucracy could have gotten so badly in the way of what would seem to be simple common sense.

However this case is eventually resolved on a criminal level, it raises serious questions that may also need to be resolved in civil court, via a Portland wrongful death or Portland medical malpractice lawsuit. Even if there were compelling reasons to adhere to procedures designed to dispatch emergency care across town, rather than across the hospital’s own parking lot, one needs to ask, in turn, why the emergency protocols themselves were so rigid.

February 13, 2011

Driver in Fatal Portland Bus Crash Convicted in Multnomah Court

by Matthew D. Kaplan

The criminal phase of the trial of a Tri-Met driver responsible for what The Oregonian calls “the worst transit tragedy in modern Portland history” has reached a turning point. Earlier this month, Sandi Day was convicted on all six charges she faced stemming from last year’s fatal Portland bus crash.

According to the newspaper, the judge “ordered Day to pay more than $1000 in fines, perform 200 hours of community service and complete a traffic safety course.” She also faces the loss of her commercial driving license and possible additional fines if she does not “comply with her sentence within a year.” As I noted in a post early last summer, the accident has already led to changes in Tri-Met’s operating procedures.

Day drove her bus into five people last April as she executed an illegal left turn. According to The Oregonian, police testified at her trial that she kept driving for 2.5 seconds after hitting five pedestrians in a crosswalk at approximately 13 miles per hour. Two of the pedestrians were dragged beneath the bus and died. Three others were injured.

February 11, 2011

Could More Back-In Parking Reduce Oregon Car Accidents?

by Matthew D. Kaplan

An article just published by the online magazine Slate raises an intriguing question: is it safer to drive head-first into a parking spot, the way most Americans do? Or to back into it? The question is relevant because if there is strong data suggesting that backing into parking spaces is, by and large, safer that, in turn, would mean that we ought to begin looking at Oregon car accidents in different ways.

We all know, of course, that Portland car accidents can lead to any number of traumas: Oregon brain injuries, injuries to children, even wrongful death. Who among us has not had a near miss either when backing out of a parking space or when passing by (whether in a car or on foot) someone who is doing so without paying sufficient attention.

Though Slate notes that “parking lot crash statistics are a bit hazy,” it goes on to note: “a study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in 2001 and 2002 found that 14 percent of all damage claims involved crashes in parking lots (some number of which must have involved vehicles moving in and out of spaces).” Further, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in a report to Congress last year estimated that “backover crashes,” as they are officially known, “cause at least 183 fatalities annually” as well as approximately 7000 injuries. The NHTSA is studying new rules that it hopes may lower these numbers by cutting the size of vehicle blind spots.

February 8, 2011

Burn Awareness Week Highlights Danger of Oregon Child Injuries

by Matthew D. Kaplan

February 6 to 12 is National Burn Awareness Week. Here in Portland, Safe Kids Oregon (a project of the Oregon Public Health Division) opens its website promoting burn awareness with a particularly startling fact related to injuries to Oregon children: a “young child’s skin is thinner than older children and adults, and their skin burns at lower temperatures and more deeply.”

As the site goes on to note there are numerous ways that burns can happen in and around the home. We are all aware, for example, of kitchen dangers: steam, open flames, burners that look cool when they are not, etc. And most people with small children are aware that they should block sockets and replace frayed cords to lessen the risk of electrical burns. It is worth remembering, however, that burns can happen anywhere in the home. Safe Kids Oregon’s Burn Awareness Week web page, for example, includes a very useful section on bathroom hazards.

As the website notes, “accidental childhood injury” is “the leading killer of children 14 and under.”

February 4, 2011

Legislature Considers the Issue of Distracted Cycling

by Matthew D. Kaplan

Do cyclists wearing headphones pose a danger equivalent to drivers using a handheld cellphone to talk or text? That is a question the Oregon legislature is poised to address during the current session.

Rep. Michael Schaufler (D-Happy Valley) has introduced a bill (HB 2602) that, according to the advocacy organization BikePortland “would create a new traffic violation for ‘unsafe operation of a bicycle’”. The offense would target anyone riding “a bicycle on a highway while wearing a listening device that is capable of receiving telephonic communication, radio broadcasts or recorded sounds.” Violations could lead to a fine of up to $90 – the same amount as violations of the Oregon distracted driving law. To judge from the coverage at BikePortland the reaction among local cyclists has been far from positive. A selection of comments posted on the blog of BikePortland publisher/editor Jonathan Maus is pretty much uniformly negative.

An interesting aspect of this legislation which has not been addressed in the media coverage, however, is the degree to which this attempt to cut down on Oregon bicycle accidents differs in fundamental philosophical ways from the existing, year-old, Oregon distracted driving ban.

February 2, 2011

Driver to face Charges After Oregon Drunk Driving Auto Accident Kills Two

by Matthew D. Kaplan

The driver of a van whose crash left his two passengers dead earlier this week has been charged with a range of offenses, including manslaughter in the first degree and Oregon drunk driving, according to The Oregonian.

The Oregon car accident occurred Tuesday morning near Seal Rock, on the Central Oregon coast. The Oregonian, quoting Oregon State Police, reports that 24-year-old Jose De Leon Colomo was driving north on US-101 when his “van failed to negotiate a left curve, traveled over an embankment, and crashed into a tree, police said. The van broke into several pieces.”

The two passengers in the van were pronounced dead at the scene of the alleged Central Oregon drunk driving crash. Colomo, the driver, was treated at an area hospital before being placed under arrest and transferred to the Lincoln County jail. In addition to drunk driving and manslaughter he has also been charged with recklessly endangering another person and reckless driving, according to The Oregonian.

January 31, 2011

Hospital Death Highlights Complexity of Medical Malpractice Law

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A newspaper’s detailed account of a teenage girl who suffered brain damage and eventually died because of negligence during what should have been a routine outpatient procedure was presented to Congress last week by patients rights advocates, according to an account in the Sacramento Bee.

The girl suffered brain damage during what should have been a routine procedure at a Los Angeles area hospital operated by UCLA. She never regained consciousness and died shortly after her parents authorized the removal of her respirator. What is truly shocking about this case, however, is the lengthy battle the girl’s parents had to go through just to get the hospital to level with them about what happened – and the difficulties they experienced in finding a medical malpractice attorney willing to take the case because of statutory limits on medical malpractice damages.

Hospitals and doctors claim such limits are necessary to curb frivolous lawsuits. In many states, however, the effect has been to shield the medical industry from accountability for negligence, particularly negligence leading to wrongful deaths here in Oregon and elsewhere around the country. Relatively low damage limits, in particular, can create an incentive for hospitals to stall families and their wrongful death attorneys with the goal of making the case too expensive for a personal injury or medical malpractice lawyer to pursue.

January 29, 2011

Car Crash between Portland and Salem Kills Two

by Matthew D. Kaplan

Two children are dead and four people, including a child, injured following an Oregon car crash near Mt. Angel last weekend. According to the Salem Statesman-Journal the police are still investigating the circumstances of the accident, which took place at the intersection of Dominic and Meridian Roads in the town, which lies between Salem and Portland.

According to the newspaper, the Salem fatal car accident appears to have occurred when a Saturn traveling east on Dominic Road “was struck broadside by a 1998 Dodge Stratus traveling north on Meridian Road.” It noted that the intersection of Dominic and Meridian has stop signs in both directions.

Two boys, ages 9 and 12, who were traveling in the Saturn were pronounced dead at the scene of the accident while their father, the Saturn’s driver, was airlifted to a nearby hospital. Police said that “a Silverton couple and their 9-year-old daughter in the Stratus were also injured.” None of the injury victims’ exact medical status was available at the time the newspaper went to press. The newspaper reported that crisis counselors were being sent to the schools attended by the younger victims.

January 26, 2011

New Head Injury to Marc Savard Highlights TBI Recovery Issues

by Matthew D. Kaplan

The issue of Oregon traumatic brain injuries and sports has been covered in this space on a number of previous occasions. I have noted in the past that while Portland is not an NHL city, the increased attention being paid to head injuries and concussions in the hockey world merits our attention.

Last spring I wrote about the serious concussion suffered by Boston Bruins forward Marc Savard in a game against the Pittsburgh Penguins. Savard, one of the team’s stars, was knocked unconscious by a check to the head and taken off the ice on a stretcher. He returned briefly during the playoffs about two months later but was clearly far from 100% and was placed back on the disabled list soon afterward. Partly because of the injury to Savard (one of several especially serious head injuries in the latter part of last season) the league revised its rules on hits to the head before the current season began in October.

Savard himself missed the first two months of the current season. After playing well over the last six weeks, however, he is once again spending time with doctors, rather than on the ice in the wake of yet another blow to the head and yet another possible concussion in a game against Colorado last week, according to the Boston Globe.