By Stone Martindale Jan 21, 2008, 21:44 GMT
Dennis Quaid nearly lost his twin babies at Los Angeles hospital Cedars-Sinai due to negligent handling of a powerful medication.
Dennis Quaid (R) and his wife Kimberly Buffington (L) posses for pictures before the premier of the film 'Smart People' at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, USA, 20 January 2008. EPA/GEORGE FREY
Back in November, nurses had mistakenly given Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace 1,000 times the recommended dose of the blood thinner heparin.
Nurses had noticed Zoe oozing blood from an intravenous site on her arm and a spot on her heel, state records show.
But that night, even as hospital staff scrambled to reverse the effects of the heparin, Quaid told the Los Angeles Times that no one notified him or his wife, Kimberly, of the crisis.
The first that Dennis Quaid learned of the medication error was at 6:30 a.m. the next day, he said, when he arrived at the Los Angeles hospital. Treatment decisions had been made without them, according to Quaid in an interview with the Tmes on January 15.
"Our kids could have been dying, and we wouldn't have been able to come down to the hospital to say goodbye," Dennis Quaid said in a 90-minute interview Monday, the couple's first since the overdose.
At the door of the children's hospital room, he said, he was greeted not just by a pediatrician and a nurse but by a representative of the hospital's risk management department.
The Quaids said they spent the day horrified as doctors and nurses hovered over their sick children. At one point, as a bandage was being changed, blood spurted from the area around Thomas' clipped umbilical cord and hit a wall about 5 feet away, Dennis Quaid, 53, shared with the Times.
"They were in incubators with cords attached to them and monitors, and you could barely hold them," said Kimberly Quaid, 36. "Every time you'd move them, the alarms would sound. . . . The stress was overwhelming."
Now in his first TV interview since his headline making medical drama, Quaid opened up toand told Extra that things have settled down.
“Everything is great. The kids are fantastic…They’re home and getting lots of love," Quaid revealed at the Sundance Film Festival this past weekend.
For more Sundance coverage tune in to “Extra” on Monday, January 21st and for all the latest celebrity news, log on here.
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