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A $17.9 million settlement has been awarded to a mom from Brooklyn who had her hands and feet amputated during a shocking medical incident. The settlement comes from the city and a hospital. The legal fight for Tabitha Mullings lasted for three years, but her fight to once again live normally might never end.
“The reality is, I’m going to be like this the rest of my life,” said Mullings, according to the New York Daily News. Mullings also suffered partial blindness because of an infection she developed when doctors sent her back home and paramedics said they would not take her back to the hospital.
“I’m always going to have to have help to do everything, using the bathroom, using a toothbrush. I can’t do anything on my own,” said Mullings, who is the mother of three boys.
Mullings made it clear that the money awarded in the settlement will not help her forget what she faces in the mirror each day when she awakens.
“I dream about running and jumping rope double Dutch and then I wake up and it’s not like that,” she said. “Waking up is a nightmare. I may be the strongest woman on Earth; at the end of the day someone has to put a pin in my hair.”
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The nightmare story began back in September of 2008 when she was admitted to the Brooklyn Hospital Center emergency room and then sent home for what was diagnosed as kidney stones and given painkillers. The very next day she had to call 911 twice because of numbness and unbearable pain but medics from the FDNY would not transport her to the hospital.
Mullings was rushed to the Fort Greene hospital the next day but upon arriving she found out she had already developed a sepsis infection that had spread through her entire body. Gangrene hit her extremities and she fell into a coma. Upon waking up from the coma she found out that her hands and her feet had been amputated and that she was legally blind in one of her eyes.
Brooklyn Hospital and two doctors who work there will have to pay $9.4 million to her and New York City has to pay $8.5 million to her.
“This is a fair and reasonable and amicable resolution,” said Sanford Rubenstein, the lawyer for Mullings. “Justice has been done.”
Mullings now has prosthetic feet to help her walk around and perform daily task, such as raising a loving family.
“Now that the lawsuit is behind me, I look forward to going on with my life and caring for my children the best I can,” she said. “I pray what happens to me never happens to anyone again.”
