Articles Posted in Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy

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Kaleb Avalos-Lanteros was born with what amounted to a fractured skull. The injury caused brain damage and was first recognized while Kaleb was in the neonatal intensive care unit at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Chicago.

The cause of Kaleb’s skull fracture was not acknowledged by anyone but was alleged to have happened when Kaleb was being cared for in the NICU. No one took responsibility, so Kaleb’s parents relied on the claim of res ipsa loquitur in suing lots of defendants, which included the hospital, EPC Healthcare Staffing and another group of companies affiliated with Sodexo Inc.

The lawsuit and its complaint included claims for what the lawyers called “specific negligence” in addition to the claim of res ipsa loquitur, which literally means, in Latin, the thing speaks for itself. In other words, the law allows this theory to be applied for a claim in which the event alleged could not have happened in the absence of negligence. That presumption is rebuttable and can be defeated, but would be a question of fact to be decided by a jury as the finder of facts.

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A settlement was reached in a case where a newborn, known as “Doe,” was born with a congenital condition in which part of her internal organs developed outside of her body.Right after her birth, Doe underwent a series of surgeries to place those organs inside her body.  After one of the surgeries, Doe began having difficulty breathing.  Her treating doctors placed her on a mechanical ventilator and cardiac machine and also gave her medications, all of which were not successful in returning her oxygen saturations to normal.

Doe then suffered cardiopulmonary arrest, which resulted in permanent brain damage.  Doe died two years later.

Doe’s family sued the hospital and Doe’s treating physicians claiming that the defendants chose not to provide extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) and also failed to timely transfer the child to another hospital. Use of ECMO, a heart and lung machine for babies that circulates blood outside the body, would have permitted Doe’s body to rest and recover, the lawsuit claimed.

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Matthew Chimis’s mother went into labor during the early morning of Oct. 26, 1997.  She contacted her obstetrician, the defendant, Dr. Scott Pierce, who told her to go to Gottlieb Memorial Hospital; he said he would meet her there. Chimis was admitted to Gottlieb’s labor and delivery unit as a vaginal birth after Cesarean section patient and placed on a fetal heart monitor.

A few hours after Chimis arrived, the hospital staff paged Dr. Pierce twice, once at 3:30 a.m. and another time at 4 a.m. in order to advise him of his patient’s status. At 4:10 a.m., Dr. Pierce spoke to a nurse who reported a lack of progression of labor and that the fetal monitor showed tachycardia, which is a heart rate that is above the normal range for a fetus. 

Dr. Pierce spoke with the mother on the phone and they both agreed she would wait for the doctor to come to the hospital to do a C-section since delivery was not imminent given the prolonged labor.

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