Follow-Up on Dennis Quaid’s Kids
Actor Dennis Quaid recently appeared on “60 Minutes” to discuss his kids’ medical malpractice case (follow the link to a video clip of part of his interview with Steve Kroft).
Quaid twins Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace nearly died last November at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles when they were mistakenly given a massive drug overdose.
Quaid believes such mistakes occur too often. “They happen in every hospital in every state in this country and…I’ve come to find out, there’s 100,000 people a year killed…in hospitals by medical mistakes,” he tells Kroft. “It’s bigger than AIDS. It’s bigger than breast cancer. It’s bigger than automobile accidents and yet, no one seems to be really aware of the problem,” says Quaid.
The Quaid twins were mistakenly given the drug Heparin, an adult-strength blood thinner, instead of Hep-lock, a version of the drug a thousand times weaker that’s routinely used to clear IV lines in pediatric patients. It caused the infants, who were in the hospital for a suspected infection, serious hemorrhaging. “Our kids are bleeding from everyplace that they’ve punctured…They were working on Boone, whose belly button would not stop bleeding…blood squirted across the room…. It was blood everywhere,” recalls Quaid. “It was a life-and-death situation.”
Tags: doctors, malpractice
