Thyroid cancer is an abnormal growth of cells that starts in your thyroid, a small, butterfly-shaped gland at the base of your neck. Doctors group these types of cancers by how the cells look and grow, meaning they fall into several categories: papillary, follicular, medullary, and anaplastic.
Papillary carcinoma is the most common type of thyroid cancer and is slow growing. A typical treatment option for this type of thyroid cancer is radioactive iodine treatment, a non-invasive medical procedure where you swallow a capsule or liquid containing a mild dose of radiation to treat an overactive thyroid or destroy leftover cancer cells.
This treatment, however, should not be administered if the patient is pregnant because the radioactive isotope crosses the placenta and can severely damage the developing fetus’s thyroid gland. That is why doctors must perform proper tests to confirm the appropriate path of treatment for all patients. It is also why patients must be informed of the risks of every treatment when making decisions on which path to take.
In this case, our client, who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, was not given these courtesies, resulting in unnecessary and harmful risks to her pregnancy. Not only did she have a battle with cancer, her baby was born with congenital hypothyroidism and will require lifelong treatment to avoid severe developmental effects. The Townsley Law Firm fought for her and her baby to recover a settlement of over $650,000.
Two Failures: A Missing Warning and a Missing Lab
This case involved two distinct breakdowns, each of which alone can constitute negligence.
The failure to warn. Before a patient undergoes a treatment with serious known risks, the doctor is required to inform the patient of those risks so the patient can make an informed decision. This is the principle of informed consent. Radioactive iodine’s danger to a pregnancy is exactly the kind of material risk a patient of child-bearing age must be told about. Our client was not advised about it. She was never given the information she needed to raise the possibility of pregnancy, request testing, or reconsider timing.
The failure to check labs. Independent of the warning, the standard of care calls for confirming that a patient is not pregnant before administering radioactive iodine because the consequences of treating a pregnant patient are so severe. A pre-treatment lab check would have shown the pregnancy before the injection was given. That check did not happen, and the injection proceeded.
Both individual failures are serious and should never occur. Together, they removed every safeguard that existed to prevent exactly what happened.
Why Radioactive Iodine and Pregnancy Are a Known Danger
Radioactive iodine works by targeting thyroid tissue, which naturally absorbs iodine. That is what makes it effective against thyroid cancer. It is also what makes it dangerous for a developing fetus.
After a certain point in gestation, the fetal thyroid begins to develop and absorb iodine on its own. Radioactive iodine given to a pregnant patient can cross the placenta and be taken up by the fetal thyroid, damaging or destroying it. The result can be congenital hypothyroidism, a condition in which the child is born without adequate thyroid function.
This interaction is not obscure or newly discovered. It is well established in medicine, which is precisely why confirming the absence of pregnancy before treatment is a recognized safeguard. The danger was known. The safeguard existed. It simply was not used.
What Congenital Hypothyroidism Means for a Child
The thyroid produces hormones essential to growth and brain development, especially in infancy and early childhood. When a child is born with congenital hypothyroidism, the body cannot produce enough of these hormones on its own.
Left untreated, congenital hypothyroidism can cause serious and irreversible developmental effects, including intellectual disability and impaired physical growth. The condition is managed with lifelong thyroid hormone replacement, and careful, consistent treatment is what stands between the child and those severe outcomes. That means a lifetime of medication, monitoring, and medical care.
For a family, this is not a temporary hardship. It is a permanent responsibility created by a preventable failure, with lifelong medical needs and costs that a properly handled treatment would have avoided entirely.
