Heart Patient Wins $430,000 in ‘Missing’ X-Rays Case

A Superior Court jury awarded a 61-year-old Compton woman $430,000 Friday after finding that a cardiologist improperly removed X-rays of her heart from a hospital, leading to a traumatic five-month delay in triple-bypass surgery.

The jury found that Dr. Edward Abrams, in a 1980 dispute about unnecessary heart surgery at Paramount General Hospital, took the X-rays of Mercedes Bellard’s heart and did not return them for a year, even though he knew the missing films had caused a delay in her surgery.

Jurors awarded Bellard, a disabled maid, $280,000 in compensatory damages and $150,000 in punitive damages after a two-month trial. They found Abrams guilty of negligence, intentional misrepresentation of fact and battery in the civil case.

“It’s not much considering all the pain I went through,” said Bellard, whose attorneys had asked for $5 million, including $2 million in punitive damages. “My chest hurt, and I was scared I was going to die before I got that surgery.”

Abrams, who now directs the cardiac care unit at Charter Suburban Hospital, formerly Paramount General Hospital, could not be reached for comment Friday.

During the trial, the Palos Verdes physician testified that in early 1980, he took Bellard’s X-rays and those of 11 other patients to show state and local officials that Paramount General had a substandard open-heart surgery program. Heart surgery at the hospital was, in fact, stopped in mid-1980 after a series of surprise inspections verified Abrams’ complaints.

Bellard’s attorney, George Glascoe, told the jury: “Even if the hospital was the worst institution there was . . . you cannot put a person’s life in danger.”

Glascoe claimed that Bellard’s life was threatened by the delay in surgery, caused in part by the need for a second set of heart X-rays after Abrams’ “theft” of the first set. Bellard underwent surgery in September, 1980, but has been in the hospital as recently as last fall with heart problems and other respiratory ailments.

“Mrs. Bellard was simply a tool, an innocent victim in a hospital power play,” the lawyer said.

Abrams said the X-rays showed that Bellard did not require surgery and that her condition should have been treated with medication. But he acknowledged that he had erred in telling a hospital employee he did not know where the X-rays were and in not turning them over to her doctors when he learned her surgery had been delayed.

Those admitted “errors in judgment,” however, must be considered in a larger context, Abrams’ attorney, David Richman, said. He told the jury that his client was not the cold-hearted physician depicted by Bellard’s attorneys, but rather a highly regarded professional who had the courage “to stick his neck out” and challenge his own hospital when he saw colleagues doing unnecessary and dangerous tests and surgeries.

Partly because of Abrams’ complaints, county and state officials in April and May, 1980, conducted a series of surprise inspections of Paramount General, a 184-bed hospital.

The officials noted a number of deficiencies at the hospital and demanded an immediate end to open-heart surgery at the facility. The hospital eventually lost its accreditation as a direct result of the faults noted in the inspections.