A Multnomah County Circuit Court jury has awarded $7.8 million to the family of a Portland woman whose doctors missed a suspicious mass on her annual breast-screening scans — allowing the mass to balloon in size for two years and the cancer to spread, killing her several years later.
In an 11-day trial that ended this week, jurors agreed that a radiologist at Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Center was negligent and caused the death of 51-year-old Wendi Lui.
The verdict is rare, lawyers for Lui’s estate and other medical malpractice lawyers said, because many families don’t have the capabilities or know-how to learn of their doctors’ mistakes. On top of that, healthcare systems can be reluctant to admit their mistakes.
But Gene Lui, the husband of Wendi Lui, had an extensive medical background as a psychiatrist who worked for the Legacy Health system. He said that he noticed problems with his wife’s case and began digging, ultimately hiring lawyers who discovered the system’s errors.
“From the beginning, I was hell-bent to get this to a trial,” Gene Lui told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “Because if this got settled, these people who I used to work for would say, ‘We didn’t do anything wrong.’ And nothing will ever change.”
Rachel O’Neal, a lawyer for Wendi Lui’s estate, said Gene Lui received repeated settlement offers from the defendants, Legacy Health and Diagnostic Imaging NW. But they all came with stipulations that the institutions weren’t at fault and agreements that Gene Lui wouldn’t talk about the case, O’Neal said.
“They offered a substantial sum, and Gene did not accept it because he did not want to be silenced,” O’Neal said. “There was no sum of money that was worth sweeping it under the rug. … Gene wanted to be able to tell his story. He wanted to be interviewed by the press. He wanted people to know what happened.”
The jury ruled that Dr. Kari A. Thomas, a radiologist at Legacy who reviewed a 2019 scan of Wendi Lui, was at fault for her death.
Thomas didn’t respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Legacy Health declined to comment.
In a written statement, a lawyer for Diagnostic Imaging NW, which employed Thomas at Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Center, said Thomas had acted as a competent medical provider.
A picture of good health
Before her cancer diagnosis, Wendi Lui — a pastry chef, graphic designer, wife and mother of a teenage son — from outside appearances was the picture of good health, her husband said. She was an open water swimmer who, in the year before her cancer diagnosis, completed the Portland Bridge Swim. That’s 11 miles in five hours under all of the city’s 12 bridges. Gene Lui said he kayaked by her side in support.
Wendi Lui was also among the unlucky lung cancer patients who developed the disease despite having never smoked. Those patients account for 10%-20% of American lung cancer cases, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Though her cancer started in her lungs, it was visible on MRIs of her breasts starting in 2018.
That’s when the then-46-year-old received her first breast MRI at Legacy Good Samaritan in Northwest Portland. She received an MRI in addition to a mammography because she had dense breasts and a history of family breast cancer.
Her estate’s lawyers said the MRI showed an approximately 1-centimeter mass, the size of a small blueberry, in one of her lungs.
In 2019, the mass had grown to about 2 centimeters. But it wasn’t until 2020, when the mass had tripled in volume and was the size of a large grape, that a radiologist identified it as suspicious and Wendi Lui was ultimately diagnosed.
Attorney Stephen Voorhees, one of the attorneys for Gene Lui, said medical standards require radiologists “to look at the whole image,” not just the breasts. But Voorhees believes that radiologists in 2018 and 2019 failed to do that.
After a radiologist in 2020 identified the mass as concerning, surgeons removed it. But doctors determined that the cancer had already spread to four of Wendi Lui’s lymph nodes. She was diagnosed with an advanced stage of non-small cell lung cancer.
It is the same type of lung cancer that Pope Leo, also a nonsmoker, was diagnosed with in October. The difference, O’Neal said, is that doctors noticed the pontiff’s cancer early — removing the growth and determining no further cancer treatment necessary because the disease was localized.
It would be two wasted years for Wendi Lui before doctors realized what was going on in her body, the estate’s lawyers said.
With a delayed diagnosis, her survival rate plunged
Whether the first radiologist who reviewed Wendi Lui’s scan in 2018 was at fault wasn’t a central question of the lawsuit because more than five years had passed by the time Gene Lui sued in 2024. That radiologist could no longer be held liable.
But Diagnostic Imaging NW contended during trial that Thomas, the company’s radiologist who analyzed Wendi Lui’s 2019 scan, wasn’t at fault. Attorney Mike Wiswall wrote in a four-sentence statement to The Oregonian/OregonLive that Thomas looked at “the area in question” in Lui’s lung, but interpreted it as “an imaging distortion commonly seen in that portion of a breast MRI.”
“The issue at trial was whether a careful radiologist interpreting the 2019 MRI, without knowledge of the later diagnosis, should have flagged that area for further evaluation,” Wiswall wrote.
Wiswall said he called on “nationally recognized breast imaging specialists” who testified that Thomas had acted competently “in all respects.”
But the jury sided with Gene Lui’s lawyers, who argued that the earlier images showed the suspicious mass was there in 2018 and 2019 and called for urgent further investigation.
O’Neal called the defendants’ unwillingness to say they made a mistake “sickening.”
Had Wendi Lui been diagnosed even as late as 2019, she would have had an 85%-90% chance of surviving, O’Neal said. But by 2020, when her cancer was discovered, her survival rate plummeted to 26%.
Saying goodbye, fighting for change
Even so, Wendi Lui embarked on more than three years of grueling chemotherapy, radiation and other treatments. Twice doctors declared her in remission, but the cancer always came back.
In the latter stages, Gene Lui said, his wife lost her ability to walk, to use her arms and to see.
When she was told she had just weeks to live, she decided it was time to die under Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act allowing physician-assisted death. She did so in December 2023, in the Southwest Portland home that she shared with her husband and then-17-year-old son.
Gene Lui said it was a difficult decision to file the lawsuit in 2024. He resigned from Legacy shortly thereafter and moved to California to help patients deal with the psychological tolls of cancer.
“It took a lot of consideration and a lot of anger, to be honest, for me to proceed with suing a fellow physician,” he said. “It looks like an absolute betrayal against your brothers and sisters.”
But he said this week’s verdict feels like “justice” that may spark some change.
“I am hopeful,” he said, “that we will be able to save someone’s life because these radiologists will be a bit more careful in the future.”
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