Dennis Quaid said there was “blood everywhere” as doctors and nurses worked to save his newborn twins after they were given an overdose of a blood thinner.

“They were working on [my son] Boone, whose belly button would not stop bleeding. … Blood squirted across the room about six feet and landed on the wall,” the actor told CBS’ 60 Minutes.

The twin boy and girl born to Quaid and his wife, Kimberly, by a surrogate mother were mistakenly given an overdose of heparin, a blood thinner, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles last November.

“We all have this inherent thing that we trust doctors and nurses that they know what they’re doing,” Quaid said in his first at-length TV interview about the ordeal. “But this mistake occurred right under our noses.”

Quaid, 53, said the twins “were basically bleeding out at that point.”

In December, the Quaids sued Baxter Healthcare Corp., saying the drug maker was negligent in packaging different doses of the medicine in similar vials. 

While Dennis Quaid and wife Kimberly are lucky that their twins are still with them today after a hospital-administered overdose of an adult blood thinner had them fighting for life in November, not all victims of medical mistakes are so lucky. In fact, according to a 2000 Food and Drug Administration article, 44,000-98,000 Americans die each year not from the medical conditions they checked in with, but from preventable medical errors.

The Quaid twins, Zoe Grace and Thomas Boone, had been admitted to the hospital shortly after birth for routine treatment of a staph infection. They were supposed to receive a dose of a pediatric blood thinner, but were instead given lethal doses of Heparin, which thinned their blood to a consistency like that of water, according to Quaid in a 60 Minutes Interview March 16.

According to the Institute of Medicine, medication errors result in more than 7,000 deaths each year just in hospitals, with thousands more in outpatient facilities. Kimberly and Dennis Quaid are launching a foundation with hopes of building awareness about medical malpractice and negligence and finding ways to eliminate it.

The FDA article lists some of the most common types of medication errors, according to the American Hospital Association:

*Incomplete patient information (not knowing about patients’ allergies, other medicines they are taking, previous diagnoses, and lab results, for example)
*Unavailable drug information (such as lack of up-to-date warnings)
*Miscommunication of drug orders, which can involve poor handwriting, confusion between drugs with similar names, misuse of zeroes and decimal points, confusion of metric and other dosing units, and inappropriate abbreviations.

*Lack of appropriate labeling as a drug is prepared and repackaged into smaller units
environmental factors, such as lighting, heat, noise, and interruptions, that can distract health professionals from their medical tasks.

If you or someone you know has been the victim of medical mistakes, contact a Medical Malpractice Attorney to discuss your legal options.

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