A Burden Lifted : ‘Now There’s a Light,’ Disabled Girl’s Mother Says About Settlement

Barbara Ruben turned down the volume of her daughter’s nursery rhyme record and answered the telephone.

It had been ringing all day Saturday. Friends were calling to congratulate her on winning a medical malpractice settlement that could end up totaling $17.5 million.

“Everybody thinks I’m rich,” Ruben said, finally taking the kitchen wall phone off its hook. “I have to tell people that I’m not going to Europe next week or buying a Mercedes. The money goes to Lauren.”

From her wheelchair, 6-year-old Lauren Ruben brightened at the sound of her name.

A pretty, dark-haired girl who looks like a typical first-grader, Lauren cannot walk or talk or sit up by herself. But she recognizes her name and smiles when she hears it. She tries to reach out but cannot lift her arms.

Severely brain-damaged just after her birth, Lauren has the mental ability of a 9-month-old baby.

She must be hand-fed and diapered. She wears special leg braces during the day, when she can be propped up in her padded, child-sized wheelchair. She sleeps at night in a body jacket to support her spine.

Lauren must be watched constantly.

A structured malpractice case settlement approved Thursday with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center will pay for physical therapy and 24-hour-a-day care for the rest of Lauren’s life.

“Such a burden has been lifted,” Barbara Ruben, 43, said Saturday. “One of my biggest fears has been what will happen to her after I’m gone. Who will drop in to visit Lauren at the old state hospital?”

Under terms of the settlement, Cedars-Sinai’s insurers will pay $500,000 in 90 days for Lauren’s care and will place $900,000 more in an interest-paying annuity account. That account will eventually be tapped to make monthly payments to Lauren for the rest of her life. If she lives to be 70, the payments will total $17.5 million.

None of the money will go to Barbara Ruben or her former husband, Jay Ruben of Chatsworth.

The couple have paid dearly for the mix-up at Cedars-Sinai on Nov. 17, 1982, when a young medical intern took more than five hours to notice that newborn Lauren’s respiratory system was not sufficiently supplying her brain with oxygen.

Five months later, the Rubens learned from a doctor the extent of their daughter’s resulting brain damage.

“On a Tuesday, I had a little girl that I thought had colic. On Wednesday, I had a severely retarded, spastic quadriplegic--a child that will never function properly,” Barbara Ruben said.

The stress from their daughter’s condition contributed to the couple’s breakup and divorce two years later.

Ruben eventually took on three part-time jobs to make ends meet. When Lauren turned 3 and was enrolled in a special education program at Reseda’s Lokrantz Elementary School, Ruben began working as a secretary at Congregation Beth Kodesh in Canoga Park, as an independent printing saleswoman and as manager of the Reseda townhouse complex where she lives.

“I love her,” she said. “I cried and cried when they wanted to put her on a bus to take her to school.”

Her condominium neighbors help Ruben load the child’s heavy, $3,800 wheelchair into her 1983 Honda when Ruben takes Lauren to therapy sessions. They occasionally baby-sit when Ruben needs to make quick runs to the grocery store.

“I don’t have a personal life,” Ruben said. “I don’t go to the movies--I can’t remember the last movie I saw in a theater. I never go out to dinner. I never go out with friends. I haven’t had a vacation since 1981.”

The settlement will change some of that.

Nearly half of the $5,500 monthly payments will go for Lauren’s therapy. Those treatments are designed to keep her arms and legs from withering and to do such things as teach her to chew.

The money will also be used to buy a lift-equipped mini-van and to hire nurses’ aides to look after Lauren.

“Lauren must be watched constantly. She needs a lot of little things that you and I take for granted. She can’t give a good, deep cough to clear her throat. All she can do is cry when she hurts. She can’t lift her hand and point if her ear hurts, for example.”

Once help is hired and trained, “I’d like to spend a weekend in Palm Springs. Trips to New York and Florida to see relatives will come later,” Ruben said.

Terms of the settlement call for annual verification of expenditures made for Lauren.

“Lauren’s my client for the rest of my life,” said lawyer Bruce G. Fagel, who represented Ruben. It was Fagel, who worked as a medical doctor for 10 years--including a stint at Cedars-Sinai--who discovered the hospital’s negligence.

“People see the $17.5-million figure and assume it’s a big pot of money. But that’s the cost of medical care for this child. It will simply keep the child alive, as alive and functional as possible.

“If there’s technology to let her interact with her environment that is developed in 50 years, she deserves the right to be here to benefit from it.”

Cedars-Sinai officials have refused to comment on Lauren’s case other than to acknowledge the settlement.

Ruben said she has slowly come to grips with her daughter’s condition.

“I’d always said I wished Lauren’s mentality could be intact,” she said Saturday.

“Now, I don’t know. In her little world, she’s content. To be physically locked in a body like that for life and know it would be worse.”

Until Thursday’s settlement, Ruben had felt things could only get worse.

“I was going deeper and deeper into the hole,” she said. “There was no light at the end of the tunnel. Now there’s a light.”