Dennis Quaid: hospital didn’t tell us what was happening with poisoned babies

Dennis Quaid has spoken out for the first time about when his newborn twins were hospitalised following an accidental overdose at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Twins Zoe and Boone were just ten days old when they were accidentally given 1000 times the recommended dose of blood thinner Heparin - but the hospital didn’t tell new parents Dennis and wife Kimberly what was happening.

The In Good Company star told the Los Angeles Times the hospital reassured him “they’re fine, they’re just fine” when he called up to check on their condition that evening: “Our kids could have been dying, and we wouldn’t have been able to come down to the hospital to say goodbye.”

They didn’t find out about the problem until the following morning when they arrived for an early morning hospital visit: “They were in incubators with cords attached to them and monitors. You could barely hold them.”

Dennis also recalled a terrifying moment when a nurse was changing a bandage on their son Boone: because of the excess drug, his blood gushed from his clipped umbilical chord and splashed on a wall five feet away.

The twins have since recovered and an investigation has blamed the hospital’s failure to follow procedures for causing the mix-up. The Quaids have already filed a lawsuit against the pharmaceutical company that makes the drug for unclear packaging but have not yet decided whether to also sue the hospital for damages.