Jeffrey Kim said he was relieved when his doctor at Straub Clinic & Hospital told him that the chronic and persistent pain that he had been feeling in his mouth for nearly two years was not cancer. That was in 2009.
Two years later, after consulting other doctors, dentists and specialists to find out the source of the pain, Kim discovered that the cause was indeed cancer, in his salivary glands. And the tumor, which would have been the size of a lima bean when Kim went to Straub in 2009, had grown to the size of a fist.
After nine surgeries to get rid of the cancer, reconstruct his face and jaw plus follow-up radiation treatments, Kim had racked up medical bills approaching $1 million.
On Tuesday, a state jury awarded the 43-year-old Hawaiian Airlines flight attendant $5.62 million for Straub’s failure to diagnose the cancer — $2.62 million for his current and future medical bills and the rest in general damages.
A spokeswoman for Straub parent Hawaii Pacific Health says company officials disagree with the verdict and are exploring their options with their legal counsel.
After a three-week trial, the jurors deliberated about a day and a half before reaching their verdict.
"I’m just happy to be alive," Kim said.
He emphasizes the importance of early detection.
Kim’s lawyer, Rick Fried, says doctors at Straub failed to detect the cancer because they did not perform a magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, test.
"They did some tests but they did the wrong tests," Fried said.
It wasn’t until an oral surgeon recommended Kim get an MRI test at the Queen’s Medical Center that an ear, nose and throat specialist there discovered the tumor in 2011.
Kim returned to work in September last year. His fellow Hawaiian Airlines employees donated vacation time so he could undergo numerous surgeries, treatments and recovery.
He has also resumed his physically active lifestyle, but avoids high-impact activities like running, hiking and body surfing because of some of the surgeries he underwent to reconstruct his jaw. Surgeons removed both of his fibulas, the smaller of the two bones in the lower leg, for bone grafts.
Kim says he has resumed lifting weights but is not able to do bench presses because one of his pectoral muscles was moved to reconstruct the floor of his mouth.
