On Friday, Walgreen Co. was ordered by a jury to pay $25.8 million to the family of a cancer patient given a medication that caused a stroke and then several years later, death.

Beth Hippely was prescribed Warfarin, a blood thinner, in 2002 while being treated for breast cancer. According to court documents, the prescription she received at a Walgreen's pharmacy was 10 times what it should have been. The overdose caused a cerebral hemorrhage which led to permanent bodily injury, disability, pain, and then death. Hippely, a mother of three, died at the age of 46. Apparently, the error occurred when a 19-year-old pharmacy technician misfiled the prescription.

Hippely's family has been seeking justice for five years.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest forms of cancer. So any bit of progress on the pancreatic cancer front is a big deal. And researchers are happy to report they've found a chemotherapy drug that can help patients who have received surgery prevent a return of the disease for a longer period of time.

In a German study, participants who received Gemzar, or gemcitabine, lived an average of 13.4 months without their cancers coming back. Participants who did not receive the drug lived without the disease for 6.9 months. While the findings of this study may seem modest, they really are quite encouraging because pancreatic cancer is such a rapid killer, and patients with this disease have the worst chances of recovery.

This study, published in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association, brings hope for the mere 20 percent of pancreatic cancer patients who are candidates for surgery. While surgery is the best hope for a cure, the disease still returns in the majority of cases -- so Gemzar is surely worth a shot.

It should be noted that some study authors report financial ties to Gemzar drugmaker Eli Lilly and Co. Researchers, however, report the firm had no influence in design or data interpretation.