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A Nurse Medication Error or a Drug Information error?
Testimony of Dennis Quaid and Kimberly Quaid Before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform of the United States House of Representatives
Chairman Waxman and Members of the Committee:
Thank you for inviting my wife, Kimberly, and me here today to share our experience as parents of two infants harmed by the negligence of a prescription drug manufacturer. As I’ll explain, our newborn twins nearly died because of a drug company’s failure to put safety first. It is our hope that these proceedings will raise public awareness of the issue before the Committee today: When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves the sale of pharmaceutical drugs, does that preempt the right of consumers to sue the manufacturer if the drug later causes injury or death? This is an issue, I’m sure, most Americans are not aware of, but it is one that could adversely affect all Americans, our family included. As many of you already know, our twins received a potentially fatal overdose of the blood thinning medication Heparin last year.
Medical Errors Related Topics
Our Life-Altering Story
Thomas Boone and Zoë Grace Quaid were born on November 8, 2007. They were four weeks premature, but healthy and beautiful, and, after three days in the hospital, we took them home to begin our new life as a happy, much-expanded family.
On their eleventh day of life, Kimberly noticed an irritation on T-Boone’s belly button and Zoë Grace’s finger. Being nervous new parents, we took TBoone and Zoë to the pediatrician immediately, and, after examining them, he sent us to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center – one of the top hospitals in Los Angeles – for a more in-depth diagnosis. Lab tests at Cedars revealed that both of our twins had a staph infection, and we were told that they would have to be admitted to the hospital to be put on a continuous intravenous drip of antibiotics. Our hearts sank as we accompanied the twins to the pediatric ward, where they were placed in a room to begin their treatment.
At about 11:00 am the next day, a nurse came to the room and said she needed to replace the now empty bags of antibiotic. According to standard procedure, the nurse was supposed to clean the IV lines connected to our twins’ little arms with 10 units of a blood thinner medication called Hep- Lock, the idea being that the very small dose of heparin contained in Hep- Lock allows the IV to flow freely. What was not standard procedure was that she mistakenly injected the twins with a massive overdose of 10,000 units of the drug Heparin, which is 1,000 times the normal 10-unit dose of Hep-Lock our babies should have received. This happened while Kimberly and I were present in the room.
Unaware of the catastrophe that had just occurred, Kimberly and I spent the afternoon and early evening standing vigil over our twins until our doctor suggested we go home and get some rest. We were exhausted, not having slept the night before. The twins seemed to be resting comfortably, so we decided to go home, but not before leaving express instructions to the doctors and nurses to call us if anything changed in our infants’ condition. We had no way of knowing at that point that the potentially lethal quantity of Heparin in their tiny bodies was turning their blood to the consistency of water.
After we left, a nurse on duty noticed that Zoë Grace had an abnormal seepage of blood coming from a place on her foot where blood had been drawn. No alarms were raised. Incredibly, sometime after 7:00 pm, both babies were injected with yet another 10,000-unit overdose of Heparin. One nurse prepared the medication, and then handed it to the instructor nurse, who then handed it to the nurse in training as the instructor lectured the trainee on how infants must only receive a 10-unit dose of Hep-Lock. They then left the room and continued their rounds.
At about 9:00 pm, Kimberly and I were at home trying to get some restless sleep when Kimberly was suddenly struck with a hammer blow of overwhelming dread. She became inconsolable, crying out with a mother’s intuitive certainty that our babies were in trouble: “They’re passing,” she said. This did not make sense to me. I had called the nurse’s station an hour and a half earlier and had been told that the twins were fine. But, to calm Kimberly’s fear, I called again and was put through to the nurse in our room. Kimberly wrote down the time for some reason. The nurse told me in a measured tone that the twins were fine. I was assured. Kimberly became less frantic, and we both eventually fell into a fitful sleep.
But the twins were not fine. In fact, they were fighting for their lives. Their now water-thin blood was flowing out of every place that they had been poked or prodded. They faced the very real possibility of hemorrhaging through a vein or artery, causing massive brain damage or failure of one of their vital organs.
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