Dennis Quaid’s newborn twins, Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace, are now in the Intensive Care Unit of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. The twins were given 10,000 units of Heparin, a anti-coagulant (blood thinner) once on Sunday morning, and again on Sunday evening. Adults might get as much as 5,000 units of Heparin in a subcutaneous injection. The infants were given 10,000 units of Heparin in an IV, which is far more serious. The infants began bleeding everywhere, and are now being given Protamine Sulfate which is the antidote for Heparin.

The excuse from the hospital is that a technician stored the Heparin in the wrong place, and when a nurse grabbed the medicine for the babies without looking, it was the wrong dosage. As many as thirteen patients were mistakenly given the overdose of Heparin.

Nurses are supposed to follow the “five rights” of medication administration:

1) the right patient
2) the right drug
3) the right time
4) the right dose
5) the right route (mouth, intravenous, etc.)

If a nurse gave a medication without even looking at the drug, and drug dosage, he/she was giving to an infant then that person needs to lose their license immediately. Infants and children are given medication based on body weight because it is so easy to overdose them on any drug. Nurses working with infants and children receive special training to help them learn the math involved in calculating medication dosage based on a patient’s weight in kilograms. If thirteen infant patients were all overdosed on the same dose of Heparin, then that means that nurse did not even check the Heparin dose thirteen times.

More alarming is that the hospital said small doses of 10 units of Heparin are used to flush IVs. Many years ago the plastic needle in a patient’s arm was called a Heparin lock, and a small dose of very diluted Heparin was used to flush the plastic needle several times a day so it would not get plugged. However that all changed at least 10 or more years ago when the blood thinning effects of Heparin was considered harmful and unnecessary, so the plastic needles were from then on flushed with normal saline, and still are today, especially in hospital units caring for infants and children. When the plastic needle in patient’s arm started getting flushed only with normal saline, the name changed from Heparin lock to Saline lock.

Not only do lawsuits need to be filed, but hospital staff, and administration at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center need to be held accountable for this completely avoidable and horrible mistake.

A personal injury attorney wrote an article titled "Stop Me Before I Kill Another Infant With Another Heparin Overdose." In the article he writes:

"Administering an adult dose of Heparin to an infant is the type of error that should only happen once in the history of a hospital. But, here we have the incredible news that the same error occurred at the same hospital five years ago. Is there anything we can do to keep this hospital from killing infants?

Three infants have now died as a result of this repeated stupidity."

Click here to read the article.

The twins were born to Quaid and wife Kimberly Buffington November 8 via a surrogate mother.

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