And you can’t put a price on emotional trauma like that – not knowing whether your own children are going to live or di… what’s that? You can put a price on emotional trauma like that? And that price is $750,000? Sweet!

Dennis Quaid’s family has reached a settlement of $750,000 against the hospital where his children almost died. And they were just tiny children – imagine how much we’d get if we almost died in a nightmarish medication mix up! To the hospital! It’s label-swapping time!

Dennis Quaid isn’t the box office draw he once was. Time was he could get any film made, no matter how obviously ridiculous it sounded – a movie about a tiny man flying a rocket through Martin Short’s arse, a confusingly-accented detective movie, a version of Jaws that’s in 3D where the shark’s jaw gets exploded off at the end – but those were the good old days.

You know what Dennis Quaid has been reduced to starring in now? Vantage Point. And that wasn’t even a film – that was just 10 minutes of Forest Whitaker looking confused repeated for what seemed like an eternity. The poor man has to really graft to make a wage now, so he must be thrilled to high heaven about the cheque for $750,000 because his newborn babies almost died agonising deaths because of a staff blunder, right? Right? Anyone? No?

You may remember that last year Dennis Quaid’s baby twins were lucky to escape with their lives after inadvertantly being injected with 1,000 times the recommended dose of an anti-coagulant. And the incident changed Dennis Quaid for the better – though grateful that his children eventually made a full recovery, he also realised that the overdose was completely preventable and took it up with the drug company responsible.

And the hospital responsible too, apparently, because its just given him $750,000 as a settlement. People reports:

Dennis Quaid and his wife Kimberly have reached a settlement of $750,000 against Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for the accidental overdose of their newborn twins in 2007. “The settlement is the result of extensive negotiations between the parties and their respective legal representatives, and is intended to avoid the time, expense and uncertainty of litigation,” say papers filed in L.A. Superior Court on Monday.

Dennis Quaid hasn’t yet said what he’s going to do with the settlement yet – there’s a chance he could use it to found an organisation to lobby for clearer labelling on medication boxes, or maybe he’ll put it into a trust fund that’ll give his children the lifestyle that Smart People can’t. Or maybe he’ll just spend it on publicly slagging off Meg Ryan as viciously as he can some more. Honestly, we’d be fine with any of them.

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You might have already been under the impression that Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan didn’t especially get on, what their bitter divorce eight years ago and all, but they don’t get on. In fact, so incessant is the bickering between Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan that we’re starting to remember why we stopped letting either of them be famous for so long.

We’ll go into this latest spat of bickering between Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid in a moment, but for those of you in a hurry it can best be summed up by Meg Ryan going “ner ner-ner ner ner ner,” in public and then Dennis Quaid being all like “Oh why I oughta…” about it. Hopefully that’s cleared it all up for you.

Forget your Posh & Becks and your Brangelina and your Kerry Katona and her repulsive gonk of a husband – Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan were literally the golden couple of romantic comedies about microscopic Russians being injected into Martin Short’s arse of the early 1990s. They were adorable – Meg Ryan was America’s favourite sweetheart and Dennis Quaid was America’s favourite fourth-choice budget-conscious Tom Cruise replacement.

But good things couldn’t last and, during the filming of Proof Of Life, Meg Ryan’s fling with Russell Crowe put an end to her marriage with Quaid forever. Why are we reminding you of this? Well, two reasons really. Firstly, because the affair happened eight whole years ago, and secondly because Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid are still prattling on about like a couple of filthy old wazzbarrels.

You may have realised, but Meg Ryan has a film out, The Women. It’s a very important movie for Meg Ryan because, for the first time in about a decade, it’s a movie that looks like it wants to be a hit. It isn’t – it’s rubbish – but at least it’s not an erotic thriller or a drama based on a plucky real-life female boxing promoter, and that’s a big step forward for Meg at the moment.

So Meg’s promoting The Women very carefully, by trying to only slag off easily-ridiculed vice presidential candidates and her own ex-husband. Meg Ryan dragged up her divorce from Dennis Quaid to the latest issue of InStyle magazine:

“Dennis was not faithful to me for a very long time, and that was very painful. I found out more about that after I was divorced.”

Now, that’s quite a petty, vindictive thing to do. What happened between Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid happened eight years ago, and to bring it up now for the sake of a movie is beyond ridic… what’s that? Dennis Quaid has decided to publicly slag off Meg Ryan in an equally petty and vindictive way? Oh, well in that case it’s fine. Here’s what Dennis Quaid told the New York Daily News:

“It was eight years ago, and I find it unbelievable that Meg continues publicly to rehash and rewrite the story of our relationship. Also, I find it regrettable that our son, Jack, has to be reminded in a public way of the turmoil and pain that every child feels in a divorce.”

God! These people! Why don’t they just leave it alone, eh? Both Meg and Dennis have moved on in recent years – Meg to the world of adopted babies and critical obscurity and Dennis to almost-dead babies and critical obscurity. Can’t they just be happy with what they’ve got?

Also, bitching about your ex-spouse in print is just so early 1990s. If Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan are serious about tearing open all the red-raw wounds of their divorce in public, they need to get with the times. Someone needs to throw a laptop at an old lady in a wheelchair, that’s the only way we’ll take the pair of them seriously.

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.

Read more:

Dennis Quaid recounts twins' near-death experience – Reuters 

But although his new son and daughter survived the giant Heparin overdose – and are thought to be recovering well – Dennis Quaid is still thirsty for revenge. That's why Dennis Quaid and his wife Kimberly Buffington are suing Baxter Healthcare Corp, which manufactures Heparin, for £50,000 in a product liability lawsuit. It shows just how angry Dennis Quaid must be to pursue Baxter through legal paths, because in the past he's resolved any outstanding medical difficulties by shrinking himself down to a sub-atomic level and injecting himself up Martin Short's arse.

There are basically two things that parents never want to hear. One is "This is my new boyfriend. His name is Joshua but everyone calls him Devil Puke," and the other is "Sorry, we appear to have accidentally given your newborn baby twins 1,000 times more of this anti-coagulant drug than we were supposed to. Whoops."

And although Dennis Quaid still has the first one to look forward to, he knows the stomach-dropping fear of the second only too well. Last month the lives of Dennis Quaid's baby twins were put in jeopardy when hospital workers at the Los Angeles Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre inadvertently injected them with 10,000 units of blood-thinning drug Heparin instead of the usual 10.

Fortunately Dennis Quaid's twins have recovered well from the almighty, near-fatal cock-up, but that doesn't mean that Dennis Quaid is going to forgive and forget. No, Dennis Quaid wants revenge, just like in that film of his, Jaws 3-D. But, you know, he wants it by suing a pharmaceutical company instead of exploding a big shark's mum with a hand grenade. For once.

So, long story short, Dennis Quaid has taken out a lawsuit against Baxter Healthcare Corp because he claims that different volumes of Heparin should be labelled more visibly, and the fact that they aren't is grounds for a product liability suit on the basis that he wants no other children to go through the same thing.

However, Baxter is claiming that the babies were only overdosed in the first place because hospital workers can't read numbers very well. Baxter spokeswoman Deborah Spak says:

"This is not a product issue. The issue here is about improper use of a product. While we strive to clearly differentiate our products and dosages, no amount of differentiation will replace the value of clinicians carefully reviewing and reading a drug name and dose before dispensing and administering it."

While it's not our place to speculate on legal matters that we clearly know nothing about – for once – the main thing is that Dennis Quaid's twins are OK. And the other main thing is that all of their future medical ailments will be cured by injecting a miniature Dennis Quaid into their arses and letting him fly around their guts getting slightly drunk, singing Sam Cooke songs and occasionally battling miniature evil nonspecific Europeans in a fight to the death above some stomach acid.

Read more:

Dennis Quaid And Wife Sue Drug Maker – Associated Press 

But, in truth, even when you've fictionally been injected into Martin Short's buttocks you still have to cope with immense tragedies like the rest of us. That's something Dennis Quaid had to come to terms with pretty quickly this week when his newborn twins were accidentally injected with 1,000 times more of the anti-coagulant drug Heparin than usual. However, the good news seems to be that Quaid's twins are recovering well and showing "no adverse reactions." Hopefully this news will put an end to what must have surely been one of the most traumatic times Dennis Quaid's life.

True, the second-most traumatic time was when Dennis Quaid read the The Day After Tomorrow script and realised he'd be paid to out-run some ice, but that shouldn't diminish the relief he should be feeling now.

Because it's not an obvious source for sarcastic wisecracks, we've been choosing not to bring you news of Dennis Quaid's newborn baby twins getting accidentally injected with 10,000 units of an anti-coagulant drug instead of the recommended 10 in a Los Angeles hospital. It's not an ordeal we'd wish on anybody, even Britney Spears. And that's saying something.

But – to recap – on Sunday Dennis Quaid's newborn baby twins, a boy and a girl born through a surrogate, were inadvertently given a dosage of anti-clotting drug Heparin that was 1,000 times larger than normal. The potentially disastrous overdose has been blamed on a technician at the Los Angeles Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre placing the drug on a wrong shelf, which a nurse grabbed without apparently checking properly and administered.

However, after what must have been an indescribably tense few days for Dennis Quaid and his wife Kimberly Buffington, the hospital's chief medical officer  Dr. Michael L. Langberg has announced that the twins are recovering well. Without naming the twins explicitly, Langberg said that while three patients were overdosed in all, one started clotting again naturally and the remaining two were treated with Heparin-reversing protamine sulfate, and everything is getting back to normal:

"Additional medical tests and clinical evaluation conducted on the two patients indicated no adverse effects from the higher concentration of Heparin or from the temporary abnormal clotting function. Doctors continue to monitor the patients."

Although there are bound to be repercussions from the internal investigation that's currently underway to discover why this terrible accident occurred in the first place, at least Dennis Quaid and Kimberly Buffington can be sure that the worst is now over and that their babies are no longer at any real risk of serious consequence.

And with that weight off his mind, Dennis Quaid can now focus himself onto other things, like why he hasn't made a decent film for 20 years.