A Texas mother claims a Dallas-area emergency room facility didn’t do enough to respond when her daughter fell to the floor during a difficult birth, leaving her in a coma.
Makayla Thomas arrived at Preston Hollow Emergency Room, a Dallas-era freestanding emergency room facility, on June 29. She was 26 weeks pregnant, with intense abdominal pain and vaginal bleeding, the latest development in a challenging pregnancy.
She’d previously been admitted to Dallas’s Texas Presbyterian Hospital, which diagnosed her with a kidney infection and given antibiotics earlier that month, related to a potentially untreated urinary tract infection.
When Thomas was admitted at Preston Hollow, she began to go into labor alone in an exam room as she waited for a doctor to arrive.
Thomas told news station WFAA she pushed her baby out, and it rolled onto the floor. She began recording videos as employees of the ER responded.
“Is that the baby? Is it dead?” Thomas asks in one video.
“It appears to be…yeah,” an employee replies.
Later videos capture the personnel at Preston Hollow listening for a heartbeat and giving the baby, who was eventually cut out of the amniotic sack, chest compressions. At various points in the clips, employees tell Thomas to stop recording.
Being born inside the amniotic sack is what’s known as an “en caul” birth, a rare and potentially dangerous condition that occurs in less than 1 in 80,000 vaginal births and cuts off newborns from the oxygen needed to survive.
Thomas was eventually transfered to a larger hospital for care and her daughter survived, though the baby remains in a vegetative state and may never recover, a condition her mother believes is linked to the tough birth.
“I definitely do believe if they had started reviving her right away when they came in the room and saw, this could have been a lot different,” Thomas told WFAA. “I feel like they failed me.”
The ER refused to answer specific questions from the station about Thomas’s care, but said it followed state health guidelines.
Texas has the most freestanding emergency room facilities in the country, according to the Texas A&M University School of Public Health, handling nearly one quarter of ER visits in the state.
These freestanding ERs, which are sometimes satellite locations of larger hospital systems and sometimes independent facilities, were designed to serve as lower-cost and more convenient alternatives to traditional ERs, and often treat people with lower-level health problems.
A Texas A&M study, however, found they often serve a similar role as their larger hospital counterparts, for a similar cost.
“The costs are about the same, as is the volume at hospital EDs [emergency departments],” assistant professor Daniel Marthey, an author on the study, told the university’s website. “
Some Texas institutions warn against using such freestanding ERs, arguing they can cause high costs for patients who are out of network and don’t offer swift care in high-level emergencies.
“If you have a true emergency, a freestanding ER must transfer you by ambulance to a hospital for the right level of care,” the Teacher Retirement System of Texas warns its members. “This delays your care, costing you time that may be critical to your recovery. And — in the most extreme cases — your survival.”
Thomas and her husband Joe are raising money on GoFundMe for the care of their daughter.
