Sepsis is a life-threatening medical emergency that happens when the body has an extreme response to an infection. A few warning signs of sepsis can include shivering, extreme pain or discomfort, pale or discolored skin, sleepiness or disorientation, high heart rate with a weak pulse, and shortness of breath.
When a patient visits the emergency room multiple times in a short timeframe with symptoms, standard protocol triggers a deeper clinical and safety review to find underlying causes and prevent further readmissions. A full history, broader diagnostics, and consideration of alternative diagnoses are part of that review. Those protocols exist so a patient gets the care she needs.
In this case, however, our client who visited the emergency room three times in five days with severe neck and shoulder pain, and no provider ordered a single x-ray or lab test on any of those visits. As a result of her physician’s negligence, she developed sepsis that ultimately cost her life.
The delays cost her the window in which sepsis is treatable. Her condition rapidly worsened, and she died just six days after she first sought help.
The Townsley Law Firm represented her family and recovered a settlement of over $400,000.
Repeated ER Visits for the Same Problem Are a Red Flag, Not a Nuisance
A patient who keeps returning to the emergency room with the same worsening symptoms is telling the staff that something was missed. The standard of care treats a repeat visit as a reason to look harder, not to discharge faster. Each return is a chance to question the working diagnosis, widen the testing, and ask what serious illness would explain symptoms that are not getting better.
Our client returned twice after her first visit, and each time she left with a prescription instead of a workup. The returns were treated as if they carried no new information, despite a rapid decline in her health. In a patient whose real problem was a spreading infection, those missed chances were the difference between catching sepsis while it could still be treated and catching it after her organs had begun to fail.
Sepsis Is a Race Against Time, and Delay Is Deadly
Sepsis kills through delay. Every hour treatment is postponed raises the risk of organ failure and death, which is why early recognition matters more than anything else to survival. The disease follows a known path: infection, then sepsis, then septic shock with collapsing blood pressure, then multiple organ failure. The treatment is well established and time sensitive. Recognize it early, find the source, start antibiotics and fluids fast, and support the failing systems.
That protocol only works if the diagnosis is made in time. Even with a clinical picture of septic shock, she sat in the emergency department for more than six hours. Her blood pressure fell through the night, and those numbers were never reported to a physician. The telemetry monitor went unplaced for five hours. By morning, her respirations had climbed, and a physician who arrived and found her in respiratory distress intubated her. She coded repeatedly and died that morning.
By the time this patient was diagnosed with septic shock, bilateral cavitary pneumonia, and multiple organ failure, the disease had advanced far beyond the point where treatment could reliably turn it around. The delay did not just postpone care. It ran out the clock.
Why Proper Testing Would Have Changed the Outcome
The testing that could have caught this infection early is routine, and the failure to perform it is what allowed a treatable illness to become fatal. Basic workup for a patient with unexplained, persistent, worsening symptoms can include bloodwork that reveals signs of serious infection, imaging that can detect pneumonia, and vital-sign patterns that point toward sepsis. These are not exotic tests. They are the ordinary tools an emergency department uses to find out why a patient is not getting better.
Her first labs were drawn only on the final visit, and they immediately showed a body in crisis. Had that workup been done during one of her earlier visits, the infection and developing pneumonia could have been identified while antibiotics and supportive care still had a chance to work. Instead, the absence of proper testing left the true cause of her symptoms hidden until it was too late. The connection between the missed testing and her death is direct: the diagnosis that could have saved her was available through routine care that was not provided.
