In a medical malpractice chamber of the Bonn Regional Court, the mother of two was awarded 20,000 euros for pain and suffering: The payment is the result of a settlement agreed upon by the plaintiff and the defendant hospital, the Gemeinschaftskrankenhaus Bonn, at the end of last week. The mother sued the hospital because the planned Cesarean section for the birth of her second child was performed without effective anesthesia.

A conciliation hearing last year failed to produce an agreement, so the court scheduled a hearing to take evidence at the beginning of last week. After several hours of proceedings and testimonies from six witnesses, including the doctors involved, as well as an expert witness, the parties agreed on the payment of the 20,000 euros.

Before the questioning of witnesses began, presiding judge Heike Jürgens revisited her settlement proposal from the previous conciliation hearing: the plaintiff would have accepted payment of the lower sum of 15,000 euros, but the lawyer for the defendant hospital had rejected a settlement.

After the testimony of the physicians, some of whom basically confirmed the plaintiff's account of what happened, while others said they had memory gaps, the defendant hospital indicated it was willing to reach a settlement.

The mother's words made quite an impression, especially because it was the second Caesarean section for the woman, which had also been planned in advance. But no one paid attention to her desperate cry for help before the delivery.

"Stop - I feel the pain," she screamed at the top of her lungs. Although the surgical team briefly paused and consulted, they then continued the operation until the birth without further medication. Only after she held her son, who was fortunately born healthy, did she receive a painkiller.

Her daughter's birth by cesarean section two years earlier went without complications. When she entered the delivery room for the second time and this time the spinal anesthesia was administered in a lying down position instead of a sitting position, she was surprised. But she was told that there were different options and that the senior anesthesiologist in charge had ordered the lying down position.

Apparently, this is indeed a common procedure, and the placement of the syringe probably went without problem. "It fit in right away," testified the doctor who performed the procedure. Apparently, however, the correctly placed injection did not have the desired effect: Due to certain individual factors - for example, an existing cyst in the tissue around the injection site - similar situations can occur in about four percent of cases.

This is what the anesthesiologist in charge told him after the surgery, recalled the plaintiff's husband in his testimony. A fact that the doctors should have paid more attention to when the expectant mother expressed her extreme pain during the initial incision.

(Orig. text: Leif Kubik; Translation: ck)