LOS ANGELES COUNTY : $550,000 Settlement Urged in Radiation Overdose Death

County officials have recommended a $550,000 settlement in a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family of a 25-year-old cancer patient who died of an overdose of radiation used in treating her.

Gloria Cabrera, the mother of two children, was diagnosed in the spring of 1987 as having a treatable form of Hodgkin’s disease. Doctors chose to attack the cancer with radiation therapy, and Cabrera underwent a number of treatments at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center through March, 1988.

Soon after, she began showing a number of serious side effects. Within a year after the treatments ended, she was paralyzed from the waist down. Further complications developed through 1992. By 1993, she had adult respiratory distress syndrome, which led to her death on May 11, 1993.

It was later determined that the complications were the result of overdoses of radiation, according to an analysis by the county Claims Board. The machine that beamed the radiation at her cancer cells was closer to her body than the doctor ordered, and the higher doses of radiation eventually caused her spinal cord to collapse.

The Board of Supervisors must approve the settlement amount.