Response to Katatak’s “A Case of Murder”
I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy on February 8, 2007. At that time, my 2 1/2 year old daughter had a cough. Just 2 days after the baby was born, I also got a cough but felt okay. On my baby’s 8th day of life he developed a fever of 100.5 and I took him to the Tehachapi Hospital Emergency Room at 10p.m. After waiting and waiting and then having the doctor walk in the room and be shocked by my breastfeeding, my baby was finally checked and we were sent home within 2 minutes of seeing the doctor (Tummala.) Of course I told the nurse and doctor about all of the symptoms he was having including mucous from the nose and coughing (boogers.) I was still sent home, no directions on lowering his fever or anything.
Six hours later I took my baby to Bakersfield Memorial Hospital ER with the same symptoms where they immediately did an RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) test. My newborn was found positive and flown to San Francisco Children’s Hospital for an 11 day stay in the NICU because he would not have been able to sustain his own life with this virus. In the NICU, doctors and nurses wore gowns and face masks and washed hands between each patient, doing all they could to stop the spread of droplets.
Thousands of babies die from RSV each year when it goes untreated. I coughed on my baby because I was breastfeeding him, giving him the best nutrition he could get. I gave him RSV (or my 2 1/2 year old daughter did.) The doctor at the Tehacahapi ER didn’t do any tests or refer a high risk patient to a pediatric doctor on-call, he just sent us home. The doctor (Tummala) could have unknowingly given RSV to many other people who than traveled to see their newborn grandchild, shaking hands and coughing along the way etc., etc., etc. Did the doctor wash his hands after seeing his infected patient? Was he a carrier of what he thought was a common cold?
This thought line of “a case of murder” is absolutely ridiculous. There can’t be a law for something like this because there would always be a reasonable doubt as to how the virus was spread. Some things are common sense, like don’t go to work when you know you are sick (especially if you work in a doctors office or hospital), wash your hands, teach your children to wash their hands, keep your kids out of daycare if at all possible….Sickness is part of living in a broken world.
If you feel a doctor has made a mistake in his treatment of a patient it should be reported to the California Medical Board. This is where other physicians decide whether the doctor deviated from normal standards of practice. To say a doctor should be held with a charge of murder for not telling someone to wear a face mask is silly. Silly, silly, silly. How about writing something about how the Tehachapi Hospital could possibly get better services to treat infants and adults or maybe have an on-call pediatrician so that when life threatening illnesses do happen lives can be saved.
This post was written in response to a blog post that can be viewed here.
