It’s a joyous occasion for any expectant mother to give birth to their child. However, for one woman in Lebanon, Tennessee, her joy quickly turned to terror after nurses brought her newborn son back from his routine “physical” when she realized that there was something important missing.
Jennifer Melton recently gave birth to her son, Nate, at University Medical Center. Shortly after she gave birth, a standard procedure occurred and nurses took the infant for a routine physical.
However, while the infant was gone, doctors made a mistake that Jennifer will never forget.
“The baby was perfect, healthy and beautiful,” Jennifer explained, according to CBS News. “At that point the nurse started to mention the procedure they had done that they had clipped his tongue,” said Jennifer. Obviously shocked to hear he had surgery, it didn’t take long for anyone to notice doctors had made a massive mistake – they had performed surgery on the wrong baby.
Somehow, a doctor had managed to perform a surgical procedure on Nate that was meant for another child. “Essentially they took our child who was healthy from the room and cut his mouth,” explained Jennifer. “At that point, I began to cry hysterically.”
The surgery that was mistakenly performed on baby Nate is known as a frenulectomy. Normally the procedure is performed when a baby is having trouble nursing and “doctors clip the small part of skin under a baby’s tongue,” according to Pix 11. Baby Nate’s tongue was working properly and didn’t need the procedure.
“There is no excuse on operating on the wrong baby, none,” explained Jennifer’s attorney, Clint Kelly. “It’s recklessness. There’s no excuse for cutting on a healthy child. There’s no excuse for mixing up babies at a hospital.” Besides, shouldn’t the doctors have known the baby’s tongue was fine when they looked at it before the operation?
For any consolation that it offers, the doctor who made the mistake didn’t try to make excuses for his actions. Instead, he took responsibility and explained in his hospital report, “I had asked for the wrong infant. I had likely performed the procedure on an infant different than the one I intended to … and I admitted my mistake and apologized.”
Jennifer is irate and legitimately concerned how the doctor’s mistake will impact Nate in the future. “We don’t know if the child will have speech problems or eating problems. The concern here is this was a healthy baby that was supposed to leave the hospital, but instead was harmed by the hospital,” said Kelly. However, the hospital has declined to comment on the incident.
There is no excuse for this doctor’s negligence. There are certain precautions that are set in place to ensure this type of mistake doesn’t occur. It’s possible that this procedure may not impact the child in the future, but had this been something far more serious – healthy baby Nate could be facing far greater struggles in his life all because a doctor decided to be lazy.
