Parties reach settlement in lawsuit with doctors
The civil trial against two doctors in the death of a Windsor woman came to a sudden halt this week after the two sides reached a resolution.
Pamela Matthews, 45, died Aug. 18, 2009, in an air ambulance on the way to a London hospital, where she was being sent for an emergency liver transplant. Ashley Soulliere, Derek Soulliere and Taylor Mallen were claiming their mother died because doctors took too long to treat and assess a life-threatening liver condition. “I can tell you that the family is very grateful that Pamela’s story was heard,” their lawyer, Barbara MacFarlane, said after the case was resolved. “Each one of her children was so brave to come forward. Their mother would no doubt have been proud of them.”
The siblings were suing Dr. Osman Ahmed Tarabain and Dr. Joham Ishaq Farhan. Windsor Regional Hospital, its Ouellette campus formerly known as Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital and two other doctors, Abdelgalel Abdelgader and John William Davis Spiers, were originally named in the lawsuit. But those cases were previously dismissed.
Mark Veneziano, defence lawyer for Farhan and Tarabain, would not comment.
Details of the resolution have not been made public. In their original statement of claim, issued in 2011, Matthew ’s children were seeking a total of $2.25 million from all the initial defendants. Matthews died from blood vessels in her esophagus bursting after swelling because of portal hypertension, or increased blood pressure. She was rushed to hospital after vomiting blood all over a movie theatre washroom in front of her young daughter.
The civil trial was scheduled for two weeks. But it was cut short on Day 3 when it was announced the two sides had reached a resolution. In her opening statements at the start of the trial, MacFarlane told jurors it took three months for doctors Farhan and Tarabain to arrange for what was determined to be an “urgent scope” to assess what was wrong with Matthews. That delay, her family argued, cost Matthews her life.