At 5:30 in the evening on Super Bowl Sunday of this year, a eighteen-month-old toddler was found face down in a swimming pool in the East Valley. The child was pulled out of the pool and EMT’s rushed him to Mercy Gilbert Hospital where the emergency room doctor declared the child to be dead at 6:20 p.m. The doctor declared the child to be dead despite the parents and the police officers, who had accompanied the family to the hospital, telling the medical personnel that the child was still breathing. The medical personnel dismissed these claims and a nurse informed the family that what they were hearing was agonal breathing, a form of involuntary respiration associated with end of life, and not true breathing. The emergency department doctor allegedly told the police officer to essentially mind his own business. “Please do your thing and let me do my thing. I went to medical school for a reason.”
The child was taken to the hospital morgue to await transport to the Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office for autopsy. A police officer who accompanied the child to the hospital morgue reported that the child continued to gasp for air after being declared dead and transported to the morgue.
When a member of the Medical Examiner’s Office arrived to transport the child’s body to the County morgue, he found the child breathing on his own. This was well over an hour after the doctor had declared the child to be deceased. Thankfully, the child was taken to a different hospital for treatment and survived the incident. It is unclear from the reporting to date whether the delay in getting treatment for the child caused any brain damage, although in such situations immediate treatment is the order of the day.
As is so often the case, the hospital has activated the cone of silence and is refusing to discuss what happened, “out of respect for the privacy of the patient.” The hospital could certainly discuss what happened without identifying the patient, but that might provide some information useful to the family in the inevitable and completely justifiable medical malpractice lawsuit that is sure to follow this incident. As I have noted so often in the past, when you or a family member are the victim of medical malpractice, it will almost always be up to you to investigate and discover what happened. The doctor or the hospital are almost never going to come clean and tell you what happened, despite what I believe to be an ethical obligation to do so.
The lesson here is clear. Doctors and hospitals make mistakes that kill and injure people and they do so on a regular basis. They can be quite arrogant and dismissive if you question their treatment decisions. If the child had not still been breathing by the time the Medical Examiner’s Office arrived to take the body, no one would have known that the child had been declared wrongly declared dead and denied the emergency treatment he needed. It was just chance that uncovered this malpractice. It is a fact that many people die as the result of medical malpractice and their families never realize that is what happened to their loved one.
Don’t let this happen to you or a loved one. If you believe that medical treatment is needed and that appropriate treatment is not being delivered, speak up. Be polite but firm. Ask to speak to a supervisor, if you do not get a satisfactory response.
