Medical Expert Witness

Filing Suit for ‘Wrongful Life’

Gerald and Elaine Greenberg married in 1976, as dental students. They practiced on Long Island and in Manhattan and raised two sons. Then in 2010, she noticed that her husband, the math whiz, was having trouble calculating tips in restaurants. “He just didn’t seem as sharp,” she said. The devastating diagnosis from a neurologist: early-onset Alzheimer’s disease…. www.nytimes.com, Filing Suit for ‘Wrongful Life’

, Paula Span, 2021

 

Together, they called a lawyer and drew up advance directives in 2011. “We gave it a lot of thought,” she said. His directive was very specific: If he became terminally ill, permanently unconscious or seriously and irreversibly brain damaged, he wanted comfort measures only. No cardiac resuscitation or mechanical respiration. No tube feeding. No antibiotics.

 

Gerald Greenberg died in 2016 — and a recent lawsuit brought by his widow charges that when he was unresponsive and near death from sepsis at Montefiore New Rochelle Hospital in Westchester County, the hospital and an attending physician there failed to follow his directive.

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