Doctor Wins $5.2 Million in Age Bias Suit Against County

A 53-year-old doctor said Saturday he plans to use a $5.2-million age discrimination judgment against Los Angeles County to mend his broken heart.

Dr. Fawzy Salama said he suffered a massive heart attack after being told four years ago that he was too old for a medical training program he had been accepted into at the county-run Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center.

A Los Angeles Superior Court jury late Friday agreed with Salama that he was a victim of age discrimination and also awarded him $258,000 for breach of contract.

Salama said he will use the money to pay for a heart transplant for himself.

The Egyptian-born Salama, who lives in Anaheim, charged that medical school officials reneged on a promise to accept him into an anesthesiology internship program in 1996.

At the time, Salama was 49 and needed to complete the internship stint to practice medicine in the United States.

A surgeon for 22 years in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Salama moved to the United States in 1993. After passing examinations required of foreign medical school graduates, he applied for the King/Drew internship as part of his residency requirement.

Salama said he was accepted into the medical school’s anesthesiology internship program by a department head. But he was subsequently rejected by a faculty committee because of his age, he said.

When he visited the medical center in mid-1996 to inquire about his status, he was handcuffed by security guards and led out, Salama said.

“I felt terrible when they escorted me. I thought, ‘I’m drowning; I want to die,’ ” Salama said Saturday at a news conference.

A short time after being notified by letter that he was rejected for the internship, Salama suffered the heart attack. He has not been able to work since then, he said.

The role that stress from his rejection played in his heart attack was a major issue in the five-week trial.

“They humiliated him by taking him out of the medical center that way,” Nathan Goldberg, one of Salama’s lawyers, said Saturday.

A 27-year-old eventually was picked to fill Salama’s internship slot, jurors were told.

King/Drew Medical Center officials could not be reached for comment Saturday.

John West, Salama’s co-counsel, said he and Goldberg intend to ask Superior Court Judge Edward Kikita to order the county to pay their legal fees; such payments can be authorized in age discrimination cases, he said. Goldberg and West declined to say what those fees will be.

As for Salama, he said his heart condition has forced him to give up any thought of practicing medicine to support his wife and three children, who are 7, 8 and 9.

His heart now functions at about 25% capacity, he said.

“It was my dream since I was a teenager to come and live in this great and wonderful country,” Salama said. “I wanted to give this generous country all that I had, and what I had was my love and my experience in alleviating the pains of patients.”

Now, he said, Salama he will use the judgment to pay for future medical treatment for himself.

“I’m on the heart transplant list. At UCLA,” he said.