04/13/19 SEE YOU IN COURT

SEE YOU IN COURT

DAMAGES
One Family's Legal Struggles in the World of Medicine
By Barry Werth
Simon & Schuster 400pp $25

Lawyers and doctors call them ''bad-baby'' cases--suits filed on behalf of infants born with brain damage. These suits have become big business in recent years, permanently changing the practice of obstetrics.
Bad-baby cases don't get much worse than that of Tony Sabia Jr. Doctors theorize that, while in the womb, Tony's blood pressure plunged after his twin brother died, leading to brain damage, cerebral palsy, and other serious disabilities. As a result, he would live in near-total blindness, with useless limbs and frequent seizures. Possessed of only ''an infant's primitive brain,'' Tony could not speak and had to be fed through a tube in his abdomen that leaked stomach acid, leaving him with painful rashes.
Damages is the story of his parents' attempt to get somebody to pay for this nightmare. They filed a malpractice suit against the hospital where Tony was delivered and against the doctor who performed the procedure. The book is moving: His Harley-riding, blue-collar parents are quickly submerged in the daily struggle to keep Tony alive. Father Tony Sr. takes two jobs to pay the bills, often sleeping only a few hours a night. Mother Donna spends her days feeding, dressing, medicating, and bathing her son, while trying to manage an increasingly unruly older daughter. Everybody breaks under the strain. At one point, Tony Sr. gets drunk, loses his temper, fires a bullet into his Chevy pickup, and is hauled off by the police. Shortly thereafter, Donna leaves him, only to return in a matter of months. Neglected daughter Shannon gets shipped off to live with relatives.
When a $6 million settlement is offered to the couple, some nine years after Tony's birth, a lawyer urges them to take it so they can ''live like normal human beings.'' ''What do normal human beings live like?'' asks Tony Sr. Nevertheless, a few weeks before trial is scheduled to begin, they take the deal.
The narrative slows down whenever it turns to the lawsuit. Werth, a freelance journalist and author of a book on a pharmaceutical startup, The Billion-Dollar Molecule, devotes pages and pages to raw text from the depositions of medical experts. Pretrial tactics are dissected at length. Quickly, the reader gets the point: The legal process is antagonistic, slow, and expensive. Everybody is concerned about money. Nobody cares much about the truth. None of this is all too surprising. What the reader really yearns for--after investing the time to learn the mechanics of medical malpractice suits--is a bit of thoughtful analysis. Is the system fair? Can it be improved? Werth basically ignores these questions, choosing instead to press forward his narrative about what is, legally speaking, a not particularly interesting or thought-provoking case.
In the end, justice seems to have been served, albeit slowly. More interesting would have been a suit in which the legal system fundamentally failed. Those aren't hard to find.
BY MIKE FRANCE