Dennis Quaid and his wife Kimberly experienced every parents worst nightmare and are speaking out about the medical mixup that endangered the lives of his newborn twins."[Mix-ups] happen in every hospital in every state in this country and … I've come to find out, there's 100,000 people a year killed … in hospitals by a medical mistakes," the actor tells 60 Minutes .
"It's bigger than AIDS. It's bigger than breast cancer. It's bigger than automobile accidents and yet, no one seems to be really aware of the problem," says Quaid.
The incident he talking about occurred last November, when his twins Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace Quaid were hospitalized for a possible infection. What should have been a precautionary measure nearly turned fatal when the twins were mistakenly given a massive overdose of the drug Heparin. A staff member of Los Angeles's Cedars-Sinai Medical Center accidentally gave them the drug Heparin, an adult-strength blood thinner, rather than Hep-tock, a much-weaker version of the drug routinely given to clear IV lines in pediatric patients.
"Our kids are bleeding from everyplace that they've punctured," says Quaid. "They were working on Boone, whose belly button would not stop bleeding – blood squirted across the room. It was blood everywhere. It was a life-and-death situation." (The babies are now doing fine.)
The Quaids are suing manufacturer Baxter International who manufacturers both drugs following the incident.
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