Four months ago a hospital worker accidentally overdosed Dennis Quaid's newborn twins with 1,000 times the recommended dose of blood thinner.
That's an almost unfathomably horrible thing for anyone to have to go through, and yet Dennis Quaid has happily given a televised interview where he recounts the whole awful story from beginning to end. Why would Dennis Quaid subject himself to this? Because he's still furious about the cock-up and claims that medical mistakes are responsible for 100,000 deaths a year in America alone, that's why.
And also we suspect it's because if Dennis Quaid didn't talk about his children almost dying, he'd have had to talk about Vantage Point instead. He must have gone for the least emotionally-gruelling choice.
Dennis Quaid is a man who knows about trauma. He's starred in a 3D Jaws movie, worked with Lindsay Lohan and spent the best part of decade married to Meg Ryan. If that's not an iron-clad training for battle-worn stoicism in the face of trouble we're really not sure what is.
And it's exactly what Dennis Quaid needed in November when his newborn twins almost died of a massive overdose of the blood-thinning drug Heparin. Without properly reading the dosage on the bottle, a nurse at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center injected Quaid's two-week-old twins Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace with 10,000 units of an anti-coagulant instead of just 10.
And now Dennis Quaid has been interviewed by 60 Minutes about his experiences and the 100,000 Americans killed by medical mistakes each year, as Reuters reports:
"It's bigger than AIDS. It's bigger than breast cancer. It's bigger than automobile accidents and yet, no one seems to really be aware of the problem." In the Quaids' case, staff at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center near Beverly Hills gave their two-week-old twins, Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace, 1,000 times the recommended dose of the blood thinner heparin last November. "It basically turned their blood to the consistency of water, where it had a complete inability to clot. They were basically bleeding out at that point," Quaid said.
Although the babies have now recovered, Dennis Quaid wants to stop this from happening again, which is why he's suing Heparin manufacturer Baxter Healthcare Corp for everything its got, or at least a tiny fraction of it. However, Baxter has queried the fact that Dennis Quaid isn't suing the hospital for employing people who can't tell the difference between 10 and 10,000, especially since the hospital didn't even notify the Quaids of the mistake until word got out to the media.
But still, that's not important because – unless those specific hospital workers are impressively prolific – they're probably not responsible for all 100,000 annual deaths. And misreading medication labels is an exceptionally easy thing to do – this one time we meant to buy a bottle of Calpol SixPlus to chug in pursuit of a legally-available buzz like our dead hero Pimp C, but we accidentally picked up a bottle of Sugar Free Calpol Infant instead.
That was our night shagged, we don't mind telling you.
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Dennis Quaid recounts twins' near-death experience – Reuters