A Brunswick doctor who medical malpractice lawyers have criticized for not ordering an X-ray days before a teenage patient died testified Tuesday that her actions were being taken out of context.
Dr. Danielle Salhany, a gynecologist for Mid Coast Medical Group, was one of the last doctors to assess 15-year-old Jasmine Vincent in late July 2021.
For weeks, Vincent had complained to another doctor in southern Maine of fatigue, stomach aches and difficulty breathing, lawyers said. A week after being diagnosed with pneumonia and prescribed prednisone, a kind of steroid, she developed abnormally swollen breasts and neck veins. She was referred to the gynecology office at Mid Coast, where Salhany was on call.
Vincent died less than a week after that visit, and it was later discovered that she had an acute form of pediatric leukemia, which she was never diagnosed with while alive.
Her mother, Lyndsey Sutherland, sued Mid Coast Medical Group under the Maine Wrongful Death Act in 2023. She’s seeking damages to be determined by a jury, should they find Mid Coast liable.
Sutherland is scheduled to testify later this week.
During opening statements in the civil trial on Monday, Sutherland’s lawyers criticized Salhany for not ordering an X-ray, for not reviewing Vincent’s previous medical records and for diagnosing the girl with gynecomastia, which they said is a typical diagnosis for adult men using anabolic steroids.
Salhany believed at the time the prednisone could have been to blame, she testified, although she wasn’t aware of any other cases where the medication had led to gynecomastia in a teenage girl. Salhany said she didn’t review any medical literature on the condition before reaching her diagnosis.
On Tuesday, Sutherland’s lawyers called two experts who testified that an X-ray scan would have helped reveal the girl’s cancer and that she likely would have survived with early treatment.
Salhany, who is not being sued herself, testified she only met with Vincent once and that she only had a narrow look into the girl’s wider array of symptoms that had been addressed by other doctors at Martin’s Point, another health care provider where Vincent received primary care.
Sutherland had also sued Martin’s Point, but dropped the health care provider from the case before trial, according to a stipulation filed on Oct. 17. The record doesn’t state why.
Martin’s Point declined to comment Monday and did not respond to a detailed list of questions Tuesday.
“There’s no way I would have been able to predict the future, that this kid had a very rare form of pediatric cancer,” Salhany said.
She testified that she hadn’t questioned Vincent’s 2021 pneumonia diagnosis, which had also been wrong, because she had no reason at the time to assume Martin’s Point hadn’t conducted a thorough investigation of Vincent’s symptoms.
Salhany spent nearly two and a half hours on the witness stand. She recalled that when she met with Vincent, the girl seemed relatively healthy, was able to speak in complete sentences, despite wearing a face mask, and was sitting upright without any help.
Sutherland’s attorney, Benjamin Gideon, asked Salhany why she didn’t order further imaging or testing, despite there being an X-ray machine on the same Brunswick campus. He also questioned why Salhany never looked at Vincent’s records from Martin’s Point.
Salhany said she never received the records. A Martin’s Point employee testified Tuesday that they had faxed the paperwork to Salhany upon her nurse’s request. Salhany testified that, as a gynecologist, many of the things Gideon said she should have done were “not within the scope of my practice.”
