Did my Son Die from Heparin?

Bell fountain MIMichael was just 18 years old when he died. He was scheduled to undergo what today is a fairly routine operation--implanting a pump to help his heart while he waited for a heart transplant--when he developed a blood clot prior to surgery. He was given heparin to clear the clot. "Once he started the heparin he never got better," his mother, Tearsa said. "It was in November when this all started. He passed on February 20th, 2008." Was heparin responsible?

"We were just waiting for him to get better so he could have the artificial pump put in for his heart. But of course that didn't happen, things just kept getting worse," Tearsa said.

""The symptoms he experienced included vomiting, his blood pressure was always low, never normal. When he was at home, he had fever, shortness of breath, swelling--his face was swelling, then his feet and hands started swelling when he was hospitalized.
And, it didn't matter what he ate, he couldn't keep it down, so he was always in and out of the hospital," Tearsa said.

Michael was hospitalized in November, then again at the beginning of December, the middle of December, and early in January for the last time. "He went in on the third of January, was released on the seventh, then was readmitted almost immediately," Tearsa said. "The symptoms got so bad that the doctors said he was dying."

The doctors were working hard to try and determine what was wrong with Michael, but they were stumped. "They did all the tests they could think of but he passed before they could find out what was going on. They did blood work every day. They knew he had an infection but they couldn't determine what it was. They just couldn't find out why he kept spiking fevers," Tearsa said. "Usually if you catch an infection in the hospital and you do a culture, it will grow fungus. But none of the cultures would grow fungus," she said. "The day that Michael died they did cultures. When he passed his blood pressure was 70 over 49," his mother said.

Toward the end, Michael was put on a feeding tube, and a ventilator. "Michael had passed out and they had to resuscitate him. They brought him back, and put him on the ventilator until the time he passed. All that time he still couldn't keep any food down. It got to the point where his kidneys were failing. Everything just started happening so fast," Tearsa said.

Tearsa has no complaints with the doctors - they did everything they could. "The doctors were very diligent; they were behind Michael one hundred percent. They even had to send out for plasma for him," Tearsa said. But if was the heparin causing the infections, it was very unlikely the medical staff could have known, as suspicions of the tainted heparin were only just starting to surface. The problem was that Michael was receiving heparin repeatedly, while he was hospitalized, so if it was the heparin, he didn't stand a chance.

"Everything just happened so fast. It was a mess. I want to know what really happened," said Tearsa. And Tearsa deserves to know what happened. If, in fact the heparin her son received was tainted, the manufacturers must be held accountable.