Before actor Dennis Quaid went to bed 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, they weren't.
Earlier that day, nurses had mistakenly given Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace 1,000 times the recommended dose of the blood thinner heparin. About two hours before Quaid's call, nurses had noticed Zoe oozing blood from an intravenous site on her arm and a spot on her heel, state records show.
But that night, even as hospital staff scrambled to reverse the effects of the heparin, Quaid said, no one notified him or his wife, Kimberly, of the crisis.
The first that Dennis Quaid learned of the medication error was at 6:30 a.m. the next day, he said, when he arrived at the Los Angeles hospital. Treatment decisions had been made without them, he said.
"Our kids could have been dying, and we wouldn't have been able to come down to the hospital to say goodbye," Dennis Quaid said in a 90-minute interview Monday, the couple's first since the overdose.
At the door of the children's hospital room, he said, he was greeted not just by a pediatrician and a nurse but by a representative of the hospital's risk management department.
A heparin overdose had left the twins' blood too thin to clot, Quaid said he was told, leaving the premature infants vulnerable to uncontrollable bleeding. They had been given an antidote.
The Quaids said they spent the day watching in terror as doctors and nurses hovered over their critically ill children. At one point, as a bandage was being changed, blood spurted from the area around Thomas' clipped umbilical cord and hit a wall about 5 feet away, Dennis Quaid, 53, remembered.
"They were in incubators with cords attached to them and monitors, and you could barely hold them," said Kimberly Quaid, 36. "Every time you'd move them, the alarms would sound. . . . The stress was overwhelming."
The Quaids said they felt betrayed and misled by Cedars-Sinai, one of the nation's most prestigious hospitals. And their anger has only grown since the release last week of a report by state regulators, who found that Cedars-Sinai had placed the Quaid twins and others in immediate jeopardy by its improper handling of medication.
