Hypoxic-ischemic birth injuries are all too common. Worldwide, hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) is the fifth leading cause of death in children under age five. The majority of babies who do survive a birth injury caused by oxygen deprivation — many of whom will not be diagnosed until weeks or even months after the injury occurred — will need lifelong care and accommodation.
Tragically, HIE is often the result of medical malpractice. As the parent of an HIE child, you have a long emotionally and physically challenging road ahead of you. Seeking legal advice from a Minnesota Birth Injury Attorney to learn how you can hold the doctor and others who caused your child’s HIE financially responsible is the right thing to do for your child and for your entire family.
What is HIE?
Hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) — also referred to as birth asphyxia, perinatal asphyxia and neonatal encephalopathy — is a type of brain damage. It is the result of a birth injury that causes oxygen deprivation and reduced blood flow immediately before or during the birth process.
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What caused my child’s HIE?
There are a variety of birth complications that can cause HIE, and many are the result of medical malpractice. Examples of the types of negligent actions that can be the cause of your child’s HIE include:
Improperly Managed High-Risk Pregnancy
Expectant mothers with certain medical conditions, such as gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, are at increased risk for complications. If you had these conditions during your pregnancy, there is a chance that your health care providers did not provide you with the level of monitoring and treatment your condition required.
Umbilical Cord, Placental or Uterine Complications
Complications involving the umbilical cord, placenta or uterus, when not properly identified and treated, can interfere with the baby receiving enough oxygenated blood, resulting in HIE. Examples include:
- Any type of umbilical cord compression before or during birth;
- Placental abruption, where the placenta separates from the uterus before the baby is born;
- Placenta previa, caused by the placenta attaching too closely to the cervix;
- Placental insufficiency, which means the placenta is unable to deliver adequate amounts of blood to the baby; and
- Uterine rupture, where the uterus partially or completely tears.
Infections During Labor and Delivery
If the mother has an infection, it can spread to the baby during labor and delivery if the doctor does not take appropriate measures. If you had an infection when you had your baby, it was your doctor’s responsibility to conduct an infection screening and prescribe antibiotics if indicated. The failure to do so could have resulted in a birth injury.
Failure to Properly Monitor the Fetal Heart Rate
If a mother and baby are being properly monitored, any signs of fetal distress can almost always be addressed before any permanent injury from oxygen deprivation occurs. This may result in an emergency cesarean section, but the baby will be spared a birth injury. If monitoring is neglected or sporadic, the chances increase that the danger signs of oxygen deprivation and other issues will be missed.
Prolonged Labor
Prolonged uterine contractions during a labor that is not progressing fast enough can harm your baby. It is your doctor’s responsibility to know when labor is going on too long. If this happened to you, your doctor should have offered you a medically sound intervention, such as an emergency C-section, before your baby could develop HIE from oxygen deprivation.
Premature Birth
If you delivered your baby prematurely and the result was a baby with HIE or another birth injury, you are within your rights to question whether your caregivers did everything possible to prevent the premature birth. There are interventions available — such as progesterone treatment or cervical cerclage — that are often successful at stopping early delivery. If your doctor failed to address your risk of premature birth, you could have a malpractice claim against them.
Improperly Inducing Labor
If your doctor gave you medication to induce or hurry up your labor, this could have contributed to your baby’s HIE. Medicines such as Cytotec and Pitocin can make your uterine contractions so strong that they actually deprive the baby of oxygen.
Post-Birth Conditions
If your baby developed a neonatal condition — such as hypoglycemia, respiratory distress or jaundice —that was not properly managed, hypoxic-ischemic injury could have been the result. In other words, your baby might have developed HIE as a result of neglect during the first month following birth.
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Why can it take so long to diagnose HIE?
Some babies manifest signs of hypoxic-ischemic injury right away. They have breathing or feeding problems and have low Apgar scores, all tell-tale signs of HIE. You might notice shortly after birth that your baby does not respond to loud noises or just does not seem alert. These signs might have been severe enough that you took your baby to the doctor and received the HIE diagnosis.
But often, you may not find out your baby has HIE for weeks or months. This is because HIE brain injuries worsen over time. In fact, there is a chain reaction of sorts that occurs when the brain is deprived of oxygen. The affected cells die, releasing toxic substances that, in turn, cause injury to other brain cells. For this reason, hypoxic-ischemic brain injuries may not – and often don’t – manifest immediately.
In fact, the symptoms that come from brain damage may not be noticed until the baby fails to meet certain developmental milestones such as crawling or walking. These child-development delays are the catalyst for further testing that can lead to the HIE brain damage diagnosis.
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My child has HIE. What can I expect?
How HIE affects any particular child depends on what parts of the brain sustained injury and how extensive the damage was. Because of this, no two cases of HIE brain damage are ever exactly the same. A child with severe HIE might develop cerebral palsy or other types of motor disorders. He or she could also develop epilepsy, seizures, and seizure disorders. In fact, any child who is affected by an HIE-causing event could end up with one, several, or all of these afflictions, along with a myriad of additional health and developmental concerns, including:
- Brain bleeds (intracranial hemorrhages);
- Hearing issues;
- Learning disabilities;
- Neurological and mental health issues, including emotional/behavioral disorders;
- Respiratory conditions;
- Sensory processing issues;
- Skin afflictions;
- Speech delays and/or language disorders;
- Orthopedic issues and pain; and
- Vision issues.
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What types of compensation could I receive?
Under Minnesota law, damages for medical malpractice are unlimited. In other words, you are entitled to seek amounts to cover all of the costs that will be incurred for your child’s entire lifetime. While it is impossible to know the exact needs of each child going forward, children with HIE that resulted from medical malpractice can typically recover the lifetime costs of:
- Making the home handicap accessible
- Adaptive equipment, such as wheelchairs, special beds, commode and bathing adaptations for accessibility
- Assistive technology
- Access to special education
- Medical care and medication
- Physical and occupational therapy
- Lost earning capacity or lost wages of the parents
- Pain and suffering and emotional distress
In certain cases, you can also recover additional damages that, rather than being linked to the actual cost of care, are intended to punish those who caused the harm.
How will I know if I have a medical malpractice case?
We recommend meeting with one of our experienced Minnesota Medical Malpractice Attorneys to undergo a thorough case review as soon as possible after diagnosis, as there are time limits for bringing suit. A successful HIE lawsuit depends on collecting, preserving, and properly presenting all the evidence that will show how the medical personnel, the hospital, and/or any others contributed to your child’s birth injury.
Call our Minnesota Medical Birth Injury Lawyer today at 612.349.2729.
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