When Do You Know There’s Been A Delayed C-Section?
How and when do you know there’s been a delayed c-section? this is a common question our delayed c-section attorneys get all the time.
Learn More:
What is Birth Injury? – Birth Injury Overview
What are “Damages” in Medical Malpractice?
Video Transcript
Timestamps
0:00 Intro
0:53 LawMD’s Delayed C-Section Attorneys Specializes In
1:26 Example of a Delayed C-Section
3:24 How LawMD Does It
People frequently ask me when do you know that there has been a delay in a c-section when the baby is in distress? The only way you can determine how you know about this is to go through the records.
You have to go through the records very carefully, you have to know what you’re going through, you have to be able to time everything very carefully because things can happen in minutes to newborns that can be damaging for the rest of their lives.
It’s important to get all the records and to spend the time doing this. Many lawyers really don’t know how to do it number one, and number two, they don’t have the time to do it.
0:53 LawMD’s Delayed C-Section Attorneys Specializes In
At LawMD, we have physicians like myself who are willing to do that, to take the time, to study the records carefully. So let me give you an example of something that could cause a major problem in a baby, and really be overlooked by the obstetrical nurse or the obstetrical doctor.
A baby comes in, a perfectly normal baby, and is going through labor having almost no problems at all, and the nurse is watching the baby carefully, maybe even the baby’s on a monitor. But the nurse goes out of the room and doesn’t come back for a while because she thinks everything is going perfectly well with the baby.
1:26 Example of a Delayed C-Section
Suddenly the baby’s heart rate starts to drop. The mother is concerned but there’s nobody there and nobody’s watching the monitor which might be on a desk outside where the nurses congregate.
This goes on for five, ten, fifteen minutes, and the heart rate stays down. At this point, the baby’s heart may not be producing enough blood to the rest of the body, including the brain. If that’s the case, then we have a major problem.
Sometime after that, the heart rate comes back up and the nurses come back into the room, and they think everything’s fine. The mother may even tell the nurse, ‘look the heart rate came down, the monitor was beeping but nobody was here’. The nurse looks at it, listens to the baby’s heart rate and says ‘well no the heart rate is good right now and I think everything’s ok’. Or the nurse looks at the strip that is generated from the monitor and says to herself, ‘oh my God, I missed a fifteen-minute deceleration of the heart rate’. This is a bad thing for the baby. The nurse knows it at that point.
We have to go through those records afterward to find out what happened to this baby, and those records have to be produced by the hospital if you ask for them.
So this is a situation that occurs occasionally. It’s not something that happens a lot of times. Many times it’s more subtle than that. But I’m giving you that example because that’s the kind of thing that can happen and can endanger a baby’s life. It also can damage the brain and the baby can’t survive. And if the baby survives it can have brain damage for really the rest of its life.
3:24 How LawMD Does It
We have to look through those records at LawMD. We have to determine whether there was something that truly breached the standard of care, and if it did, did it cause the baby’s brain damage. If it did cause the baby’s brain damage, then obviously that affects the baby’s ability to be employed, the parents’ ability to take care of that baby through the rest of their life, and it can get very, very expensive.
So if you have any questions about what I’ve just talked about, please don’t hesitate to click on the box below. They will tell you how to get in touch with us. We’d be happy to talk with you about this or any other topic at LawMD.