Hospital: Twins' Deaths Not From Heparin
The parents of twin infants who died this week at a Corpus Christi hospital where a pharmacy incorrectly mixed up doses of a common blood thinner were just teens themselves, excited about the birth of their son and daughter.
But 10 days after celebrating their childrens' births, Erika Garcia and her husband, Eric, were planning their funerals.
The hospital said its doctors have found no direct link between the overdoses and the deaths of Keith and Kaylynn Garcia's deaths. The Corpus Christi Caller-Times reported in its online edition Thursday night that a doctor told the Nueces County medical examiner that Keith Garcia died of septic infection and complications of prematurity.
Nurses at Christus Spohn Hospital South discovered Sunday night that several infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit received heparin overdoses. The hospital later confirmed that 14 infants received the overdose and three others may have just before their release, though follow up with those infants showed no ill effects.
Heparin is an anti-clotting drug used to flush intravenous lines.
"Generally, the way that you find out about Heparin being too high is that you notice that when you do blood tests or when you start IV's, they continue to bleed at the IV site," explained Dr. William Burgin of the Nueces Co. Health Authority.
"Christus Spohn (Health System) confirms that an error occurred during the mixing process in our hospital pharmacy," Chief Medical Officer Dr. Richard Davis said in a prepared statement. "The error was unrelated to product labeling or packaging."
Erika Garcia, 16, was a loving mother to their 1-year-old daughter and was excited about the birth of their twins, Garcia's grandmother Maria Luisa Hernandez told the Caller-Times.
"We weren't supposed to lose those babies," Hernandez said. "It's just not right."
Hernandez said each infant weighed about four pounds at birth but doctors told the family their lungs were too small, leaving them short of breath.
Erika and Eric Garcia had dated before marrying a couple months ago, Hernandez said. Eric, 18, works at a meat market in Alice and they had moved into a small mobile home.
The invitations for a baby shower had already gone out, Hernandez said.
Hector and Magdalena Chapa, two of the infants' grandparents, are scheduled to speak about the incident Friday morning in Corpus Christi.
"I just want resolution," Hector Chapa told CBS News Early Show anchor Maggie Rodriguez, "I want to know what happened and why it even happened."
The hospital announced earlier this week that two pharmacy employees had taken voluntary leave while the investigation proceeded. It was not immediately clear what, if anything, Thursday's confirmation meant for those employees.
Keith Garcia died Tuesday at the hospital and his sister Kaylynn died Wednesday.
They were born one month premature July 1 at Christus Spohn Hospital in Alice and transferred for higher-level care to Christus Spohn Hospital South in Corpus Christi.
The babies' parents requested and received a judge's order late Wednesday preventing the hospital from destroying any records related to the babies' hospital stay or the heparin overdose.
In an interview on the CBS News Early Show Bob Patterson, the attorney for the Garcia family, told Rodriguez that the court order requires the hospital to preserve all the evidence, records, samples and the actual heparin bottles.
"Eventually we'll get a chance to have independent experts take a look at all of that," Patterson said.
Hospital officials said Thursday that autopsies are being conducted on both of the Garcia infants and the Texas Department of State Health Services is conducting a review.
In November 2007, actor Dennis Quaid's newborn twins were at the center of a near-fatal drug mix-up in which they were administered 1,000 times the normal dose of Heparin.
"We all have this inherent thing that we trust doctors and nurses, that they know what they're doing. But this mistake occurred right under our noses, that the nurse didn't bother to look at the dosage on the bottle," Quaid told 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft in a March interview. "It was 10 units that our kids are supposed to get. They got 10,000. And what it did is, it basically turned their blood to the consistency of water, where they had a complete inability to clot. And they were basically bleeding out at that point."
Quaid's children recovered, and he has since testified before Congress in an effort to draw attention to what is one of the leading causes of death in America - preventable human, medical error.Read The 60 Minutes Interview With Dennis And Kimberly Quaid
"These mistakes that occurred to us are not unique," he told Kroft.They happen in every hospital, in every state in this country. And 100,000 people, that I've come to find out, there's 100,000 people a year are killed every year in hospitals by a medical mistakes."
The same avoidable mistake had occurred a year earlier at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis. Six infants were given multiple adult doses of Heparin instead of the pediatric version; three of the infants survived, three did not.
During the past 18 months, there have been roughly 250 medical errors nationwide involving heparin and children a year or younger, according to U.S. Pharmacopeia, the public standards-setting authority for all prescription and over-the-counter medicines, dietary supplements and other health-care products manufactured and sold in the United States.