“What did I know? I was a first-time mother.”Įstrada recovered during the next two days and was excited to see her new son. “Everything was blurry, but I saw he was shaking. He was rushed to Children’s Hospital Oakland’s neonatal intensive care unit. She delivered via emergency C-section a 7-pound, 12-ounce baby boy who she and her husband named Victor.Įstrada was shown her baby but was not allowed to hold him. Just after 1 a.m., about an hour after the twins were born, Estrada was rushed to surgery. While the twins were in surgery, Brenda Estrada and her baby were still struggling. The mother was given medication to reverse the overdose and all three recovered fully, according to sources and internal documents. The only physician on duty in the Labor and Delivery department performed an emergency Cesarean section of the twins, born just after midnight Nov. Medical staff initiated a code blue - meaning that a serious emergency with possible imminent loss of life was under way. The twins, too, were in distress, they said. The woman fell unconscious, according to witnesses. But the woman was accidentally injected with a near-fatal dose of the drug - either by human or mechanical error, staff who spoke on condition of anonymity said. The twins’ mother had been given an infusion of magnesium sulfate, a medication used to stop labor. “Everyone went running to see,” Estrada said. Suddenly, just before midnight, nurses left Estrada and her family alone for 15 to 20 minutes, she said.Īnother woman in labor with premature twins was near death. “That’s when the baby’s heart rate went down.”Įstrada’s version of events that night was corroborated by hospital staff, physicians, patient records and internal memos.Įstrada told a nurse that she needed help delivering the baby, but the nurse replied, “You need to do it yourself,” she recalled angrily. “They were like, ‘Push, push,'” she said in an interview at her San Leandro apartment. Tachycardia is an abnormally rapid heart beat. An attending nurse mentioned that her baby’s heart rate looked “tacky,” Estrada recalled. Estrada was pushing but making no progress. … As we do more and more deliveries, we’ve take on more and more risk.”īut he denied that patient care has been compromised.įor Estrada, this was supposed to be a happy occasion: the birth of her and her husband’s first child at the hospital where Brenda was born 21 years before.Įverything seemed to be going well until that afternoon. David Altman, medical director of the Alameda County Medical Center, which includes Highland, said Victor Estrada’s death was “really tragic. Nurses and several physicians have complained to management about the problems and lack of competent leadership, and the hospital has hired a consultant to fix rifts between staff and management on the unit.ĭr. Three other women said they experienced problems in care quality at the hospital’s labor and delivery unit. Medication errors, communication lapses and understaffing left Victor Estrada brain dead and a family in grief.Īnd it spurred some staff members to question whether Alameda County’s largest public hospital, in the pursuit of profits, was putting patients at risk. On the Monday before Thanksgiving 2005, seemingly everything that could go wrong did. The night of baby Victor Estrada’s birth left many who work in the labor and delivery unit at Highland Hospital in Oakland deeply shaken.
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