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At 11 weeks pregnant, then-Pleasanton resident Jessica Perry noticed she was bleeding heavily on a late spring night in 2021.
Perry was immediately rushed to Stanford Health Care Tri-Valley where medical personnel informed her that she miscarried her baby. She recounted that night leaving the hospital as being one of the worst of her life, particularly after she previously experienced a miscarriage six years earlier.
But when she visited an obstetrician-gynecologist outside of the Stanford hospital the next morning for a second opinion, Perry was both relieved and shocked to hear her baby was alive and safe – he would later be born healthy that fall.
In a jury trial that concluded last week, Perry lost her malpractice suit against the Stanford Health doctor who treated her that night in Pleasanton. However, she continues to live with the trauma of the ordeal.
“You can’t undo a lived experience,” Perry said. “My lived reality is there is a time in my life where I had two deceased children and there is no undoing that.”
According to court documents obtained by the Weekly, Dr. Tian Mi, the doctor who initially diagnosed Perry with an incomplete miscarriage, advised her that she should get a dilation and curettage — also known as a D&C — which is a procedure used to treat miscarriages.
Perry later filed a lawsuit against Stanford and the doctor who treated her for malpractice and the emotional distress she suffered during those eight hours where she thought she lost a second baby. Perry settled her case against the hospital, but according to her lawyer, they did not win the jury trial against the doctor, which concluded on June 16.
“We respect the jury’s decision and are currently reviewing our appeal options,” said Perry’s lawyer, Lilia Bulgucheva.
As of time of publication, Stanford Health Care Tri-Valley had not responded to multiple requests for comments.
According to the court documents, “Both the defendants (Stanford and Mi) deny liability claiming plaintiff was not damaged as she later delivered a healthy baby, despite the wrongful diagnosis otherwise.”
The day Perry went into the emergency room — April 23, 2021 — started off like any other day. In fact, it was the day she had first learned her baby’s gender.
For Perry, it was a particularly significant moment for her because in 2015, she miscarried her daughter. She said after that experience, it took her and her husband some time to entertain the idea of trying again — it’s also why she was cautiously optimistic with her second pregnancy.
“This was it,” Perry said regarding her and her husband’s attempt to get pregnant again. “We would try this one more time and if it didn’t go well, then we were done.”
But later that night around midnight, Perry said she felt the need to go to the bathroom and when she got up from the couch, she felt something wrong in her abdomen.
“That’s when I realized I was bleeding,” Perry said.
She said her husband called for an ambulance, but by the time first responders arrived at their condo in Pleasanton, she had already soaked three towels with blood.
Perry only lived minutes from Stanford Health Care ValleyCare (as the hospital was known at the time) so as she made her way to the emergency room, she kept assuring herself that everything was going to be fine. But even as she made it inside the hospital, it was clear the situation was serious.
“A couple of nurses started putting an IV (drip) in each arm and the one to my left started removing those towels that the paramedics had put on me and they removed the top one and she said ‘Oh wow that’s a lot of blood,'” Perry said.
The following series of events is what later became the focus of the jury trial and lawsuit against Stanford and the doctor.
According to Perry’s trial brief court documents for the June 9 hearing, the undisputed facts are that around 2 a.m. Mi performed a pelvic examination, removed a large amount of clear blood-tinged fluid in Perry’s cervix and, upon further inspection, noticed a “large clot/tissue obstructing the cervix”.
“Defendant performed a brief bedside transabdominal ultrasound and diagnosed (Perry) with an incomplete miscarriage,” according to the court documents.
She was later discharged at around 3:30 a.m.
But what Bulgucheva disputed in the court documents was that the doctor — who was allegedly aware of Perry’s first miscarriage — dismissed her concerns and requests for an ultrasound and prematurely concluded “she had miscarried based solely on the amount of blood loss.”
According to court documents, there was no evidence the doctor connected with the OB-GYN department, despite claiming he had.
In a professional negligence claim, Perry’s legal team was tasked with the burden of proof to show the physician failed to meet the standard of care, which is why Bulgucheva said they brought out a practicing emergency physician from San Diego County to testify in court against him.
“He is of the opinion that Dr. Mi breached the standard of care by failing to obtain a confirmatory ultrasound and diagnosing Ms. Perry with an incomplete miscarriage without really having all of the definitive proof that was required to do so,” Bulgucheva told the Weekly.
She said according to the San Diego physician, definitive proof would have been seeing the fetus on the ultrasound and confirming it did not have a heartbeat or seeing the dead fetus outside of Perry’s womb.
“Despite Plaintiff’s repeated requests for an ultrasound to confirm the miscarriage, Dr. Mi performed a cursory upper abdomen ultrasound, lasting mere seconds, and callously declared the fetus was gone, gesturing towards her discarded bloody clothes,” according to court documents.
Perry said learning this information made her entire body feel like it was going haywire.
“I was devastated,” she said. “I started shaking really, really hard and my throat started feeling like it was on fire … and it became harder to breathe.”
According to the court documents, the doctor allegedly then suggested the D&C procedure to “get rid of whatever is left”.
Perry, however, decided to wait for a second opinion, which is why she made an appointment for that same morning with her personal obstetrician where she received a transvaginal ultrasound and the nurse showed her son, who was still alive.
“She starts the ultrasound and she says well look there’s your baby,” Perry said. “I was shocked, I was elated, I was confused, I was happy, I was angry, I was terrified … I could not believe what I was seeing.”
Perry later saw a perinatologist who determined the vaginal bleeding was caused by two subchorionic hemorrhages, according to court documents.
After some light treatment and a healthy amount of bedrest, Perry gave birth to her healthy son on Nov. 1, 2021.
While she saw her son’s birth as a miracle, Perry still has nightmares about what would have happened if she had listened to the Stanford doctor’s alleged recommendation to abort the fetus during her 2021 emergency hospital visit.
“I think about it all the time,” Perry said. “I think about it when Hudson does something really cool for the first time. I think about it a lot at night … that evening tends to creep into a lot of my moments of joy.”
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