My 9 month old son had RSV and was diagnosed by his pediatrician. The next night his temperature spiked to 104.7. I gave him some Tylenol and just to be safe, took him to the hospital (it was midnight and that was the only place I could take him that was open). They took his vitals and temperature and educated me on what I should do next time something like this happens and signs to look for if his condition gets worse. Before we got the discharge papers and sent on our way, they wanted to take his temperature again. The nurse came in took the thermometer put lube on it and put it in my son’s rectum. While the thermometer was in his rectum her face went from calm to freaked out/panic. She pulls the thermometer out of his rectum, puts it on the bed my son is laying on, lifts his legs spreads his butt cheeks and looks at his rectum. She put the diaper back on him and says she needs to get someone else. When the nurse and another nurse come in, the nurse who was taking his temperature says when she was taking my sons temperature the plastic cover comes off the thermometer and gets sucked up into my sons colon. They can’t get it out and call a pediatric GI specialist and he says to send us home and see if it will come out with my son’s next poop and if 12-16 hours pass and it still hasn’t come out then to send us to a hospital an hour away from us and they will assist us.
14 hours pass and it has not come out so I take him to the hospital and check him in. While the doctors are taking his vitals they ask what happened and I explain what happened. The first words that come out of the doctors mouth was “I call bullshit” and explains how it’s almost impossible for that to happen because of how long the thermometer cover is and how the colon of a 9mo is. He asks me and my GF (child’s mother) if we were there, did we see it happen. We told him we were there in the room but did not see it happen. He says ok and finishes checking my son’s vitals and brings us to a room and we wait. As we are waiting in the room people are coming in and out asking us questions about what happened what the next step is, nothing unusual. The doctors tell us they are going to take X-rays of my son to see if they can see the piece of plastic inside of him but it’s unlikely it will show up due to the type of material the thermometer cover is made of. Results come back and they can’t see it. Says next step is to take him to the children’s section of the hospital (don’t remember what they called it) and they will hold him overnight to monitor him and give him laxatives to try and get him to poop it out. So we get to the children’s section of the hospital they give him the laxatives and my son poops twice and nothing, no thermometer cover.
Now it’s about 8am and they say since it hasn’t come out, the next step is to put a camera inside of him, find it and pull it out. They tell me and my GF they will have to sedate my son to perform the colonoscopy and explained the risks involved, especially since my son has a respiratory virus. We both agree because there is no other option to get the thermometer cover out. We sign the forms and they perform the colonoscopy. And send us to a waiting room right outside the room where they are doing the procedure.
The doctor comes out puts 2 pieces of paper in front of us with a bunch of pictures of my sons colon on it and says “there was never any thermometer cover inside your son” and “1 of 2 things happened, the nurse never put a thermometer cover on the thermometer in the first place or the thermometer cover fell off the thermometer and the nurse didn’t realize it”. He also said that he was the pediatric GI specialist that the nurse (who claimed the thermometer cover was inside my son) talked to over the phone and she was “very adamant that there is a thermometer cover in my son’s rectum”. I ask the doctor “are you 100% certain that there is not a thermometer cover inside my son” and his response was “I snaked your son’s entire colon (don’t remember the exact term used) and I can say with 100% certainty that there is not a thermometer cover inside your son”.
We were in the hospital for 20 hours, from 6pm to 2:30 pm the next day. Between the laxatives they gave my son, holding him down, sticking needles in him and the anesthesia and colonoscopy, it was very clear my son wasn’t happy. By the end of the visit every time someone came in the room that wasn’t me or his mother, he would get visibly uncomfortable or cry and didn’t want anyone to touch him.
Should I contact a lawyer? Is this negligence? I know we are going to get a bill in the mail for this based on what the doctors had told me. Can I sue for the cost of my medical bill?
I’m currently at work so I won’t be able to respond quickly but I will respond when I can.
I used to be a pediatric ER nurse and this post is baffling. There’s no way the thermometer cover could get sucked up a 9-month-old’s colon. I’m so confused and it makes no sense at all that the nurse would think that. Also makes no sense to me that they did all of these invasive procedures over this.
@Flynn
That’s basically what the nurse checking him in said. We were asked about 3 times if we saw it be sucked in by 3 different people and we were also asked if the nurse taking his temperature saw it get sucked in and from what the pediatric GI told us, the nurse said she was “very adamant” that the cover was sucked up inside him. Because she was very adamant it was inside him I guess that’s why they did what they did to get it out.
@Amar
Is there a possibility she only realized she forgot to put the cover on and was trying to get away from being blamed for not following safety practices, panicked, concocted a lie on a whim? Which is, even worse.
@Onyx
As a nurse, no. Can you imagine having to tell your colleagues you lost something inside a child? I would want to kill myself. I would 1000% rather be blamed for putting the handheld thermometer out of commission than causing harm to a patient.
The question is did they behave in a way that is sufficiently outside of standard of care?
I would say yes. Rectal thermometers only need to go in like 1 cm. The only reasonable explanation is that the nurse did not confirm the cover was on the thermometer before advancing it. This is very much outside standard practice, and resulted in damages (mainly in the form of medical expenses).
I think you have a very strong chance of your bills being 100% discharged if you reach out to the hospital’s patient advocate. It’s pretty clearly a mess-up. If that doesn’t work, I would talk to a malpractice attorney. They would almost certainly settle out of court since it is a stinker of a case for the hospital.
@Vaughn
That’s basically what my father had told me. Would you know if I had to have received the bill before I can talk to the hospital patient advocate or can I reach out to them now?
Amar said: @Vaughn
That’s basically what my father had told me. Would you know if I had to have received the bill before I can talk to the hospital patient advocate or can I reach out to them now?
I’ve worked in medical billing for 10+ years, and I currently manage the insurance billing for a large multi-state private practice. I can provide some guidance on this. There’s a chance the charges have already been classed as ‘no charge’ per the doctor or hospital and written off. If I was handling the billing for a situation like this, I wouldn’t even bill anything to the patient’s insurance - I would write off the whole thing as it was a nurse error that caused the subsequent procedures (I’d likely write off the whole visit including everything before the nurse error but that’s just me).
Don’t wait to receive a bill. I would call the billing department or hospital patient advocate and ask for the status of the claims. Have they been written off? Have they been billed to insurance? Etc. If they are planning on billing you any patient responsibility for the visit, I would push back. Explain that it was a nurse error that caused the situation and that you don’t feel you should be responsible for the cost of her mistake. Escalate to the proper parties within the hospital if they still insist on billing you. I can tell you that the hospital will want to avoid this turning into a lawsuit, and eventually you will get ahold of someone who understands that the cost of writing these charges off will cost much less than a lawsuit.
EDIT: if they write off the charges, request an itemized receipt showing the zero balance for your records.
Amar said: @Kelby
This is great advice, thank you. I will be contacting the billing department ASAP.
Do you have an app where you can see the patient file online to view discharge notes or anything? I worry someone will try to cover it up and you may need written records or screenshots that document the nurse’s mistake, words, etc by each other medical professional that saw your child after she claimed the cover was lost inside him.
@Vero
My GF has the app and we already have screenshots of everything in the app which includes documents that state the nurse said “my son HAS the thermometer cover inside of him” and the documents that say after the procedure there was no foreign object observed. I also kept the 2 pieces of paper that have all the pictures of the inside of my son’s colon and the discharge paperwork from each hospital visit.
@Case
This is very true. I only weighed in on the billing aspect because that’s my area of expertise. OP should definitely consult a lawyer for the rest of the situation.
Amar said: @Vaughn
That’s basically what my father had told me. Would you know if I had to have received the bill before I can talk to the hospital patient advocate or can I reach out to them now?
Amar said: @Vaughn
That’s basically what my father had told me. Would you know if I had to have received the bill before I can talk to the hospital patient advocate or can I reach out to them now?
Obviously you should not be billed for anything beyond the original issue. All the other, very expensive, procedures were caused by their issues.
If I were them, I’d apologize, tell you the entire bill is waived, and offer up some cash for your trouble. I doubt they will do that so if they don’t be ready with your demand. They will likely balk but I’m sure a lawyer could help after that.
@Lian
When we asked about billing for the issue caused by the nurse, we were told (and this is word for word) it’s like car insurance, if you get into an accident and it’s not your fault, you still have to pay for your insurance. This was one of the doctors that said that though, not their financing people.
@Amar
Doctors who practice at hospitals don’t usually know a lot about how billing is handled because it is SO complicated. The doctor probably has that car insurance answer as a stock response for billing questions but as others said, take no one’s word for anything about this except for the actual billing department.
Something I’m not seeing mentioned in the other comments, so I wonder if I’m reading this correctly, but the second visit was at a different hospital, correct? You mention they said to go to a different hospital an hour away, so is that where all the tests were done and if it was a different hospital, was it the same network/company? I don’t know enough about medical legal stuff to give advice or know how that affects things, but I wanted to clarify because it seems like it should affect your plan of recourse somewhat since the hospital that messed up is not the hospital that is charging you all the money for fixing it. It explains why they are charging you at all instead of waiving it since it was the result of a mistake and seems to me like it may make trying to work with the billing department of the hospital that did all the tests not as effective since again, it wasn’t their mess up.
I do hope that others saying you do have recourse are correct and I am very sorry your child had to go through all that.