By Donna Walter
St. Louis Daily Record/St. Louis Countian
ST. LOUIS, Mo. — An inmate who broke his leg sliding into second base during a prison softball game may pursue the lawsuit he filed against the nurses and doctor who treated him, a federal appeals court said in a 2-1 decision.
“Thank goodness,” Bryan Croft said when he heard the news Tuesday. “They’re just a mess in there. "
“Now I’ve got to try to find an attorney,” said Croft, who represented himself in this case.
Croft, who was paroled in March, was a resident of the Farmington Correctional Center when he was injured. In the lawsuit he filed four years ago, Croft said nurses Pamela S. Tanner and Wanda Patton and the on-call doctor, Robert Hampton, were deliberately indifferent in their care.
“The doctor who operated on me, he said this would never be right again because of the damage that was done,” Croft said. His leg is black and blue, and he is unable to work as a floor layer, which is what he was trained to do, he said.
Croft will have to prove the damage is due to the delay in treatment and not the break itself.
He called the prison medical personnel “heartless” and said he was in the infirmary for five days and shot up with morphine, which rendered him unable to go to the bathroom for 10 days. Croft’s medical record showed he was in the infirmary for 2½ days, the appellate judges said.
District Judge E. Richard Webber in St. Louis granted the defendants’ motion for summary judgment two years ago. The two-judge majority of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that was the wrong thing to do.
The majority - consisting of Judge Kermit E. Bye and Judge Michael J. Melloy - said Croft had enough evidence against the medical personnel to present the case to a jury. Neither judge signed on as the opinion author.
Judge William Jay Riley dissented, saying it’s not enough for Croft to allege his care was delayed; he must also present evidence that the delay resulted in harmful medical effects.
Ken Fields, a spokesman for Correctional Medical Services, said the defendants will file a motion for a rehearing before the full 8th Circuit court. In light of Riley’s dissent, the odds of the full court rehearing the case may be better than usual.
“CMS healthcare professionals working in Missouri Department of Corrections’ facilities have dedicated their professional lives to addressing the medical needs of inmate patients. They do so in a caring and professional manner,” Fields said in an e-mailed statement.
The gist of Croft’s complaint against the nurses is that they should have splinted his leg before they moved him to the prison infirmary. Instead, they tried to lift Croft onto a backboard, but his foot spun backward and hit the ground. The nurses then slid the backboard under him and took him to the infirmary.
When they reached the infirmary, Tanner called Hampton, who told her to call an ambulance and splint Croft’s leg. The ambulance took just 10 minutes to arrive, and an emergency medical technician splinted the leg roughly an hour after Tanner spoke with Hampton.
Melloy and Bye said a jury could find the nurses were deliberately indifferent to Croft’s care.
“The record showed the nurses’ acts conflicted with the emergency nursing protocol for fractures, and it is commonly known that an obviously fractured limb requires immobilization and stabilization, particularly before a person is moved, and that failure to splint or otherwise immobilize a fractured limb puts the injured person at risk for further injury and increased pain,” they wrote.
While the majority focuses on the “risk for further injury and increased pain,” Riley said the evidence failed to show Croft suffered any “vascular or neurological damage,” which is something nurses watched for while Croft was in their care over a weekend while he was waiting to see an orthopedist.
“All of the evidence reflects Croft’s vascular and neurological functions always remained intact,” Riley wrote. “With no medical evidence demonstrating any medical ill effects from the one and a half hour delay in splinting his leg, Croft’s Eighth Amendment claim against the nurses fails. “
Riley presented a detailed timeline in his dissent to emphasize that Croft was being cared for.
Croft also complained that Hampton showed deliberate indifference to his care by not following the emergency room doctor’s advice to check Croft into another hospital with orthopedic services. The ER doctor, Paul Weiland, told Hampton the fracture needed to be addressed within 24 hours because Croft could experience the loss of nerve or vascular function in his foot.
Hampton, however, decided Croft could wait in the prison’s transitional care unit until he had the opportunity to see an orthopedist. Croft was injured early on a Friday evening in 2002, and he didn’t see an orthopedist until Monday afternoon. At Hampton’s direction, the nurses regularly checked Croft’s toes for signs of vascular and neurological damage.
Again, the majority said Croft’s case should be decided by a jury. And, again, Riley disagreed. Both sides cited testimony by Weiland to support their arguments, but only Riley noted the admission by Weiland that doctors wouldn’t necessarily operate on Weiland at 2 a.m. Saturday - when he would have arrived at the other hospital - but that Croft would “probably have to say be operated on the next morning. “
Croft presented no medical evidence to show he suffered any ill effects from the 2 ½-day delay, Riley said.
“This record hardly supports a claim of negligence, does not sustain a claim of gross negligence and certainly does not bear the much heavier burden of an Eighth Amendment deliberate indifference claim,” Riley wrote.
“Prison nurses and physicians should not so readily be forced to run the litigation gauntlet, as the majority proposes here, which further increases the difficulty of prisons recruiting medical professionals,” he wrote.
Copyright 2008 Dolan Media Newswires