Price of death: hospital ordered to pay another million rubles

      This is already the third million that Sergey’s family will receive (earlier one million went to the widow, and then to the deceased man’s mother), as compensation for the “quality and timely,” as the clinic itself puts it, treatment that led to the death of a young, vigorous man.

      Recall that on February 5, 2023 Sergey Plastinin was brought to the hospital by ambulance with an excruciating headache, but the next morning he was discharged home by neurologist Tatiana Trushkova with the diagnosis “positional vertigo” and told to take glycine sublingually. No examination was performed.

      On February 6, when the ambulance brought Plastinin back to the clinic — his speech was already failing and his hands were seizing — only the number of diagnoses grew: osteochondrosis, food poisoning and epilepsy, which “fit the symptomatology.” That evening, Sergey's wife, having watched hospital staff run into the ward to gawk at the “dying young man,” while Dr. Trushkova, lying on the couch in the doctors’ lounge wrapped in her fur coat, declared she was “resting,” phoned the air ambulance herself.

      The doctors who arrived by helicopter at 11 p.m. immediately made their diagnosis and gave the prognosis: “Stroke. Unlikely we’ll make it.” The autopsy confirmed that death resulted from “progressive cerebral edema associated with acute cerebrovascular disorder in the form of ischemic infarction (four foci).” Thus, according to the expert’s conclusion, “the absence of the correct diagnosis and the loss of time led to irreversible consequences.”

      As lawyer Tatiana Bazhina, who represents the Plastinin family, explained, Kirov courts are finally adopting the position of the deceased’s relatives, compensating the pain of loss and the anger at “such quality medicine,” where a human life becomes a bargaining chip, with “reasonable awards”: “Previously, if a court recognized the ‘fault of the doctors,’ compensation for moral harm did not exceed 100–150 thousand rubles.”

      Tatiana said that when Sergey was dying his daughter was six years old, and she still misses her father, who loved his little princess more than anything. The child clearly remembers how on February 5 they skied in the park for a long time, and then her father fell ill and was taken away by ambulance. She remembers how the next morning, upon leaving the hospital, he crawled on all fours to his apartment on the second floor because his legs would not hold him. Then the doctors took him again, and he never returned home.

      Today Sergey’s daughter talks a lot about her father, and even asked her mother to go to his grave to dig it up and see “maybe Dad is still alive.” Possibly, as a well-known psychologist suggested, two years ago the child suffered an extreme trauma, and today the brain, most likely in dreams, supplies memories in which the father is alive and well and loves his little daughter. Therefore the child, unable at her age to grasp the irreversible loss, hopes even underground to find her father alive.

      By the way, in the year Sergey died, his father also passed away. The man’s heart could not bear the overwhelming sorrow and stopped forever on his 60th birthday.

      Interestingly, at the beginning of October the regional court will consider an appeal by the Verkhoshizhemskaya Central District Hospital against the first-instance decision to award one million in moral damages to Sergey Plastinin’s mother. The hospital disputes the “legality of the Sovetsky court’s decision” on the grounds that the mother did not live with her son in the same house... Then again, what can one expect from a clinic where food poisoning has symptoms indistinguishable from a stroke, and the magnitude of a mother’s grief is negated by living in separate apartments.

      It is possible that the Central District Hospital will later file an appeal to the cassation instance as well — mirroring its appeal against the first million in moral damages awarded to Sergey’s widow. Although in that first case the Sixth Samara Cassation Court upheld the decisions of the Sovetsky and Regional courts.