"My wife took Paxil for the first few months of her pregnancy - the doctor told her it was safe," Stephen said. "Up until our son Kaden was born, nothing was detected, not even by ultrasound, that anything was wrong. But immediately upon delivery he cried just once and turned blue. He was taken from the delivery room for what seemed like hours, only to be told that they didn't know what was wrong with him. But they did know that Haden's health was deteriorating, fast.
"The doctors at our local hospital called St. Mary's neo-natal unit and a few neo-natal specialists rushed over in an ambulance. He couldn't be flown out because they were concerned about air pressure in the helicopter. I rode with him in the ambulance and we had a police escort. They were working on him the whole time...when we got to St. Mary's he was diagnosed with transposition of the great arteries: his preliminary artery and aorta were swapped. This meant that blood was pumping from the heart to the lungs and circulating back to the heart and Kaden wasn't getting any oxygen to his body or brain. He went 12 hours with oxygen levels in the 20s (98-100 is normal) and suffered serious bleeding on his brain.He needed to have a balloon angioplasty so that blood could get to the rest of his body, but it didn't work. By now his condition was life-threatening and it was decided that he would be transported to Louisville, a hospital that only handles children. A nurse told me that when he got there, Kaden's little body was purple from lack of oxygen. They attempted another balloon but failed.
During this time, I had driven back home to get my wife (she had just returned from our local hospital) and we were on our way to Louisville. Just as we were leaving the phone rang: Kaden was going to die. They tried the balloon angioplasty six times and asked us what we wanted to do. I asked them to try one more time and if it didn't work, let him go with God.
Incredibly, it worked on the seventh attempt. He started to stabilize and his oxygen level went up to 90. When Kaden was eight days old, he had open-heart surgery to switch the arteries. They corrected his heart problem and put him on a lung and heart bypass; that too was successful but unnerving: because there was concern about swelling his chest had to be left open and his heart visible. I actually saw my son's heart beating - talk about getting weak in the knees! Two days later they closed his chest and he was on the road to recovery.
One month later he came home. Today he is doing OK but Kaden has a lot of impairments; his motor skills are developmentally behind but for everything he has gone through, he is high-spirited. His preliminary artery appears to be thinning and we pray he won't need a stent which would require more surgery.
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We have a strong faith and I can't explain why my son lived and others, whose mothers took Paxil, did not. But when we got that phone call, telling us they had tried that balloon six times, we got down on our knees and started to pray. Five minutes later, the phone rang and my son was going to live Later, I talked to the doctors in Louisville and they told me it was a miracle that my son was alive.
I want to say this to GlaxoSmithKline, the makers of Paxil: I am really angry. This lawsuit is not about the money. It is about compensating my son for the damage this drug caused him and you have to own up to what you did -- not just to my son, but all the other babies, especially the ones who died as a result of Paxil. You need to make it right."