Anyone who wants to deride John Edwards for being a trial lawyer should take a look at the kinds of cases he and his firm have taken on.
For background, Edwards spent his first five years as a lawyer practicing business law. In 1982, he joined a new firm and got assigned a medical malpractice case. That case, and the one that followed, established him in the field of medical malpractice. Here are the kinds of clients Edwards and his firm have represented.
- A five year old girl who sat on a defective drain in a wading pool. The suction was so powerful that most of her intestines were pulled outside her body.
- A child born with no hope of sitting, standing, walking, talking, or seeing due to an overdose of labor-inducing drugs, improper labor, and a missing pediatrician.
- A four year old boy with cerebral palsy who wasn't getting the therapies his doctor's thought he needed because his insurance company thought they weren't necessary and wouldn't cover them.
- A seven year old boy who lost most of the use of his arm when doctors neglected to run checks for complications after surgery.
- A fifteen year old boy who died after inhaling nasal packing during surgery for a deviated septum. He went into respiratory arrest in recovery. It wasn't until five hours after he did so that the doctors realized he had inhaled the packing and it was blocking his lungs. Fifteen days later the boy was declared brain dead.
- A woman who ended up in surgery and lost her uterus when she was discharged with a high temperature and low blood count and when days later her doctor referred her to a psychiatric hospital instead of examining her.
This is what he means when he says he fought for ordinary people.
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