3 months ago
CERES, CA - A Ceres woman is keeping a close eye on her five- year-old daughter after a drugstore made an error in the child's prescription.
Wilma O'Neill said she took her daughter, Ellen, to the doctor last week because she had the flu. O'Neill said she thought perhaps her daughter was suffering from the H1N1 flu virus. "She started running a high fever and had a stomach ache," O'Neill said.
The doctor prescribed Tamiflu, a compound that fights flu viruses. O'Neill said the prescription was called or faxed into the Walgreens pharmacy at Hatch Road and Central Avenue.
When she picked up the medication, O'Neill said she followed directions on the bottle labeled Tamiflu. "She took a dose Wednesday night and another one Thursday morning."
But O'Neill wondered if something was wrong because the drug didn't seem to be working. "My daughter (was) lethargic...just laying around, not doing anything and not eating."
Thursday evening O'Neill said a call came from someone at Walgreens who said, "We don't know who it is but somebody has the wrong medicine."
O'Neill said the caller asked about the color of the medication. The product she had was white. "I could hear somebody in the background saying it's supposed to be pink."
O'Neill took the bottle back to the pharmacy and that's when she discovered her daughter had been given amiodarone, a medication for irregular heart beats.
O'Neill said she went into panic mode. "Heart medication? Oh my gosh, she could die. And the lady said yes and you need to take (your child) to the emergency room right away."
O'Neill quickly drove home and called 9-1-1 for an ambulance to take her daughter to the hospital. "All the way there I'm thinking, my child's been poisoned. Is she going to die?"
Emergency room physicians ordered an electrocardiogram (EKG). O'Neill said the first tests results were fine but a second EKG showed an abnormality with her daughter's heart.
Walgreens admitted the mistake was made and apologized to Ellen's family. Company Spokesman Robert Elfinger sent News 10 a statement that read, "We have a multi-step prescription filling process with numerous safety checks in each step to reduce the chance of human error. We will investigate what happened and what can be done to prevent it from happening again."
O'Neill said Walgreens told her the matter will be "handled internally."
But she still has questions. "What happens to the pharmacist? Is she still working there? Is she going to go through more training?"
She said Ellen is starting to feel better and seems more like her old self again. But her mother is dreading tests that will be done at the next doctor's visit. "This is frightening -- absolutely frightening," O'Neill declared.
by Karen Massie kmassie@news10.net
News10/KXTV
