Hot Momma Gossip

Dennis Quaid and wife Kimberly have spoken out on how a Los Angeles hospital  mislead them about their newborn twins, who nearly died from a shocking medication dosage error.  Mistakenly given 1,000 times the normal 10-unit dose of blood-thinning drug Heparin by staff at L.A.’s Cedar’s Sinai Medical Center shortly after they were born to a surrogate mother in November, Quaid’s twins Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace were left fighting for their lives.
The twins have since been discharged after a long battle to recover, and they are now back home with their parents. But speaking about it for the first time, Dennis Quad reveals he and his wife didn’t find out until the next morning, hours after their children had been treated for the drugs overdose. 

“Our kids could have been dying and we wouldn’t have been able to come down to the hospital to say goodbye. “When you go into a hospital, you become like a child, like an infant in a way. The names of the drugs, we can’t even pronounce… We put complete trust, and we are so vulnerable like a child, innocent and vulnerable in a hospital situation.”

Quaid said on the night of the incident Nov. 18, he gave one last call to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where his newborn twins were being treated for staph infections.

“Oh, they’re fine,” Quaid recalled a nurse telling him about 9 p.m. “They’re just fine.”

Actually the twins weren’t fine, as reportedly hours earlier they had already been given the wrong dosage of Heparin and hospital staff were scrambling to reverse the effects of the massive Heparin dosage.

Kimberly Quaid described the scene when the couple did come to the hospital the next morning and first saw the twins.  She says,

“They were in incubators with cords attached to them and monitors, and you could barely hold them. “Every time you’d move them, the alarms would sound… The stress was overwhelming.”

The actor recalled one horrific scene, when one of Boone’s bandages was being replaced. Because of the excessive Heparin his system, blood gushed from the area around his clipped umbilical cord, splattering a wall 5 feet away.

Although the twins have since fully recovered, the Quaids said they feel betrayed by the prestigious hospital.  Since the release last week of a report by state regulators found that Cedars-Sinai had placed the Quaid twins and others in immediate jeopardy by its improper handling of medication, their anger has only grown.  They are also angry someone from Cedars-Sinai leaked the news of the incident to the media.  The Quaid’s made a deliberate decision not to tell relatives or friends that their children were in the hospital, because they didn’t want to worry them and because they did not want the information to appear in tabloid reports.

“We were told that it was not a big deal,” Kimberly Quaid said. “We figured we’d be home in a couple days and nobody would know any different. That wasn’t the case.”

Photo: Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times