The mother of a boy who suffered permanent brain damage after bleeding in his diapers for a day after being circumcised says they were turned away twice by a Manitoba emergency room when they sought help.
She is now suing Southern Health Region and three health care workers in the city of Portage la Prairie, alleging that her son did not receive timely medical attention and treatment in 2017.
Her claim was filed on June 22 of this year in the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench.
Health officials say it has not yet been served, a spokesman said Wednesday.
Until then, no defenses had been filed and none of the charges had been proven in court.
The child, whom CBC News is not naming due to private health information, was born healthy in 2017, according to the lawsuit.
In August, when he was one month old, he was taken to the Portage clinic to be circumcised by a doctor, an important part of his family’s Muslim faith.
About four hours after the circumcision, the parents opened his diaper and found it covered in blood.
They took him back to the clinic to the doctor who performed the circumcision. He is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, accused of failing to properly perform the circumcision and failing to properly monitor the baby’s care.
The doctor examined the baby, put petroleum jelly on him and sent him home with his parents, the suit says.
Sent home from the ER without treatment
Three hours later, the parents discovered the baby’s diaper was “soaked” in blood, according to the court document.
They changed it and put petroleum jelly on it, as the doctor advised, but they took the baby to the hospital in Portage la Prairie, where the same doctor worked in the emergency room.
Around 7 p.m. — about an hour after he was taken to the emergency room — the baby was discharged with no change in treatment, the lawsuit said.
The parents returned to the hospital at 9:30 p.m., where the baby was examined by a nurse who is also named as an accused.
Her nurse had a hard time communicating with the family, who did not speak English very well, but told them the situation was not an emergency, the suit says. They were sent back to the waiting room because there were no exam rooms available.
The family waits, but around 10:30 p.m., the father approaches the nurse, telling her again that the baby has been bleeding since morning. She replied that there were patients who needed more urgent care and reiterated that the situation was not urgent.
The child’s father said that if it was not an emergency, they should just go home. The nurse said they could, but did not ask to look at the baby’s diaper or inspect the circumcision before they left the hospital, according to the lawsuit.
The nurse took the baby’s chart to another doctor who worked in the emergency room, also named as a defendant in the lawsuit, and explained what happened.
He signed the card without inspecting the baby and gave no instructions to return the child to the hospital to be treated, the lawsuit said.
Airlifted to HSC
The parents took the baby home, but later that night he turned pale and started having trouble breathing. He was taken back to the hospital around 2:40 a.m., the lawsuit said.
The same nurse saw the baby and noticed that he was very pale and lethargic, so she took him to the triage desk and treated him as an emergency.
The baby was given an immediate blood transfusion, the lawsuit says, and was classified as “catastrophically hemodynamically unstable” — a condition that occurs when there is abnormal blood pressure that can cause inadequate blood flow to organs — and needed ” critical life-saving measures’.
He was flown by STARS Air Ambulance to the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre, about 80 kilometers east of Portage la Prairie, at 7:45 a.m. and admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit with hemorrhagic shock, which occurs when the body begins to shut down due to blood loss.
The baby was flown by STARS Air Ambulance to Winnipeg and admitted to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the Health Sciences Centre. An MRI showed he had suffered a severe brain injury. (CBC)
The lawsuit says an MRI showed the baby had a severe brain injury and remained in the intensive care unit for two weeks.
The mother claims in the lawsuit that the injuries suffered by her son were caused or contributed to by the negligence of the two doctors, the nurse and the health district named in the suit, which resulted in “severe and permanent injuries.”
Severe brain damage
The five-year-old child lives with motor disabilities, irreversible brain damage, impaired vision and speech, developmental delay. He “will continue to suffer the effects of his disabilities for the rest of his life,” the suit says.
The lawsuit seeks compensation for the child’s injuries, as well as compensation for the parents who must provide “extraordinary care” for him.
The lawsuit also alleges that Southern Health Region and the hospital were negligent for failing to provide an interpreter to help the family deal with a “significant language barrier” and failing to provide cultural sensitivity training to the staff.
Martin Pollock, the mother’s lawyer, said at the time that the parents were deeply upset by their son’s constant bleeding.
“You can imagine that when people are emotional and it affects the health of their newborns… that the struggle [with English] is intensifying,” he said.
In its statement Wednesday, Southern Health said its health centers offer language access services through Shared Health, the provincial health agency. This service provides patients with interpretation services over the phone, video or face-to-face, the health authority said.
Emergency interpretation services are also available through a contracted resource that provides 24/7 on-demand services in over 200 languages, according to the health authority.
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