A former Amesbury woman who wanted to stop having to take heart medications so she could have another child, only to end up with permanent heart damage, has won a $4.3 million verdict in a lawsuit against two Boston doctors.

With interest, the total amount will be more than $6 million, said Denyse (Gonthier) Richter's lawyer, Annette Gonthier-Kiely of Salem, who is also Richter's sister. It's one of the larger jury awards in a medical malpractice case in recent history. The jury returned its verdict Wednesday in Suffolk Superior Court.

Richter was a 39-year-old mother of three who wanted to have a fourth child when, in 2002, she saw Dr. Laurence Epstein, chief of the arrhythmia service at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Epstein was a noted specialist in a procedure that used radio frequency catheter ablations — using high-frequency radio waves to burn away abnormal cells that were causing the arrhythmia.

Read the full story here on the Newbury Port News website.