Contaminated Heparin Cost Maureen a New Kidney and Stopped Her Heart Four Times

Pleasanton CARon's wife Maureen has end stage renal disease. She needs a new kidney in order to live. She was scheduled to receive that kidney in February, 2008. But two weeks before her surgery Maureen used a vile of contaminated heparin while doing her haemodialysis, and it very nearly killed her. Today, she is lucky to be alive.

"My wife was due to have a live kidney transplant on February 15, 2008," Ron said. "About two weeks prior to that, it was a Monday morning, we were doing her home dialysis, and I gave her the heparin, which she administers herself, she is a retired nurse. After we finished dialyzing--at about two that afternoon, she began to feel nauseous, a common symptom associated with contaminated heparin. Then about four hours after the dialysis my wife began having difficulty breathing. We have an oxygen generator at home, so I put her on that but she was still having difficulty. So I called 911. By the time the ambulance arrived Maureen was in a lot of distress. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital she coded – her heart had stopped. Her blood pressure just bottomed out. The paramedics performed CPR for 20 minutes. Once she was in the ER, they got her on a ventilator to try and stabilize her. Then when she went into intensive care unit (ICU) she coded three more times. They had to use a defibrillator to bring her back. So her heart stopped four times that evening."

Maureen remained in hospital for two more months. "She was in the ICU for about 17-18 days, and the rest of the time the doctors were trying to stabilize her," Ron said." The following month she was moved to a speciality and rehabilitation hospital. She came home in the middle of March and I've been working with her every day since. For the past month we've had a nurse and a physical therapist coming in once a week. Now we're doing outpatient physical therapy. My wife is bed ridden, in a wheelchair, and she can't do very much of anything, including taking a shower."

But Ron does count his blessings in all of this. "Talk about luck – I retired two weeks before all this happened. If I hadn't been retired during this time, I would have lost my job. There's no way I could have taken this much time off work."

About a week before this happened the center that supplied the heparin for the dialysis called Ron and Maureen to advise them that Baxter was recalling seven lots of heparin, and they gave Ron the lot numbers of the contaminated blood thinner. "I checked, and we didn't have any of those lot numbers. What they should have done was recalled everything. Shame on me for not asking why they were recalling the heparin. I just thought they were having some quality issues and didn't think anything more of it," he said.

But importantly, Ron kept the heparin vials, and the lot numbers. That's key information because the vile of heparin that Maureen used was the first in a new box of heparin.

The question remains as to whether or not Maureen still qualifies for a transplant. "Now she has to go through physical therapy to get her strength back. She has weakness on her left side, the doctors suspect she had a mild stoke while she was in emergency, and she has a tremor in her left arm, which is improving because of the physical therapy that she's doing. Her speech is slurred, but that is also improving. The doctors say that her eligibility for a transplant depends on how well she recovers. The first step is to get her back on home haemodialysis," he said.

Ron and Maureen have sought legal help in this matter. "We missed the kidney transplant by two weeks as a result of this," Ron said. More to the point, none of this should have happened in the first place. "I worked for a company that handles hazardous materials, so I know all about safety and due diligence when doing quality control, especially on any product that comes from overseas, and most especially from China. The company I worked with for 30 years used to get some of its raw materials from China, and we stopped because of the quality issues." Eventually, Baxter did recall all its heparin, however it remains up to the lawyers to do due diligence.