5 Almona Street,
Glenwood,
2768
New South Wales,
Australia
Chicken nuggets My 2 year old nephew nearly died. We have only just been released from hospital at 4pm today. He has been at Westmead children’s hospital since Wednesday night. The first symptoms came early Wednesday morning.
We only figured out where the source of food poisoning contamination came from last night after the doctor told us the results of all the testing my nephew went though before we were discharged from the hospital.
We have been admitted since Thursday night to Westmead children’s hospital and myself, his mum and his dad have been swapping out to take care of him because they would only let one of us in at a time due to coronavirus.
We are all physically and emotionally drained so I apologise. As you can imagine we have been though a lot. And sleep, food and looking after ourselves in general has come 2nd to the emergency that we have had to deal with.
The bacteria found in his gut is called campylobacter.
It is a bacteria very similar to salmonella and is only really found in raw chicken. (Plus in raw cheese and some other poultry species).
The gastroenteritis (food poisoning) is caused from eating undercooked chicken or contaminated food from preparing raw chicken.
I am happy to fill out the remainder of the form and supply you with all the hospital documentation and the receipts for the food purchased through the food delivery company door dash with the time stamps for the purchase.
My nephew was in a critical condition for roughly 3 days.
Now this was also due to the fact that the public hospital system is terrible at best in Australia and it is very scary in the emergency Ward at night because the hospital is still understaffed with doctors and nurses and inadequate and faulty equipment supplies.
I’m sure that our government doesn’t really do much for caring for our medical staffs mental health Over time as well or their screening process for employees isn’t good enough because the doctors and nurses in the emergency ward were nothing short of being dangerously incompetent in the emergency ward on Wednesday night when my nephew went to hospital the first night.
My nephew typically is a very fussy little eater. It is very common for him to fight us over what food we give him.
We are always getting stressed out sometimes preparing 2nd meals for him at his meal times.
He really hates meat. Except for battered fish and chicken nuggets. We don’t cook him chicken because he has a tantrum and refuses to eat it when we do.
I am predominantly vegetarian myself. His parents are not but we just moved house and the last time chicken was prepared and eaten in this house was 2 weeks ago as we have been mostly busy with our jobs and responsibilities and having to unpack the New house and we have been ordering take aways to help with our time situation whilst we still
Organising our new house. However I would say that our kitchen has also been cleaned quite thoroughly at least a dozen times after we made the chicken a fortnight earlier so I don’t believe anything from our house would have contaminated my nephew.
I am currently working from home at the moment because I am immune compromised and am self isolating during COVID.
On Tuesday 27th October we bought a streetwise feast for lunch and I ate the potato and gravy and the Chips and my sister ate the strips and chips and Him (our 2 year old) ate the chicken nuggets and chips.
Late on Tuesday night we started seeing the first symptoms with our baby. He was hot and irritable and wingy pain crying.
We measured his temperature with a digital thermometer that we did not know was inaccurate at the time and it said 36.5 which seemed normal but he felt so hot to touch still so we administered children’s Panadol and bongella to his mouth thinking it was teething pain because his molars at the back are still coming through.
He went to sleep shortly after. The next morning on Wednesday 28th October when he woke he was still walking around and talking but seemed very lethargic.
He also started rejecting all of his food and water Quite early in the day.
By 4pm the baby had declined so badly that he was actually burning a 40.5 degree fever (Our thermometer still said 36.5).
His mom was very worried about his fever and lethargy and the fact that he was rejecting food and water and had not peed very much in his nappy all day so she made him some veggie pasta and tried to feed it to him.
She tried to spoon a mouthful in and it caused him to violently and projectile vomit everywhere.
There was so much vomit that you would have thought it was an adult vomiting if you just saw the vomit and not the toddler.
It just kept coming. He was so scared he cried hysterically. This kid usually has a pretty strong digestive system and doesn’t really do much vomiting ever. Not since he had Chollic when he was new born.
We Panicked and called an ambulance. They came within 10 minutes and they were awesome and I don’t know what their names were but the first thing the male paramedic did was take his temperature and check him over and the lady paramedic asked us questions.
Once the paramedics found his temperature was 40.5 degrees they took dad and baby in the ambulance to Westmead children’s hospital emergency. While mum and I followed in the car behind.
When we arrived at the hospital the paramedics admitted him straight away to the ward. So they did their job perfectly.
This is when our treatment began to rapidly decline. Dad and baby were given a bed and even though he was pain crying and quite obviously in a serious state of decline delirious with fever Dad and baby were left to wait for a few hours while medical professionals walked past. Giving little to no communication.
My sister and I waited in the car as one of us could only go in the relieve parent inside. Waiting for updates on what was going on inside.
My brother in law called through because they wanted a pee sample and were talking about using a catheter to get it because the baby had been there for hours and they had not managed to get a pee sample yet.
They had left him and bubba sitting in the bed at their direction with a pee cup held under Him. (We later found out he was not peeing because he was dangerously dehydrated) They told us he had an infection of some sort and they weren’t really sure if it was viral.
My sister then went in to give her husband a swap out because it was getting very stressful for dad to watch the medical people just walking past with very little to no communication.
When she went in to swap out at around 12 midnight and she received the exact same treatment until a doctor came to her at around 3 am with discharge papers.
No tests were done. No drip was administered even though the fever still burning away at 40.5 degrees at he was clearly out of it still. We were told to just keep an eye on his liquid intake and give him panadol because they assumed it was most likely viral. He still had not even passed any urine in the whole time we were there and the mentioned catheter pee test sample was never taken.
We left with our unwell infant after having received little to no medical attention.
As soon as we got home they took bubba to bed with them so that they could monitor him over night because as you can imagine we were all on edge.
After about 10 minutes of settling in my bedroom for the night because at this point it was about 5am he started projectile vomiting again in bed. My sister got up and immediately proceeded to call for me.
I called Westmead hospital back to tell them that he his state had declined again and that he was still not taking the water and hydrolyte that we put in his bottle and was now violently vomiting again.
I was told by the same doctor that discharged him that we needed to just wait it out and see our GP. Which would open in 3 hours at 8:30am.
We were at our GP office by about 9:30 with Him and he agreed that the baby indeed had an infection and that we needed the pee sample.
He gave a little bag and we took Him home.
About 2 hours later My sister was able to get the pee sample with bag that our doctor had given her. The urine was brown in colour. Also in that time the baby had proceeded to decline even further. He wasn’t even crying anymore and his eyes were going dark and were looking sunken in. He was critically dehydrated. We knew it.
We rushed him back to our GP who tested his urine and he told us that he was in a critically dehydrated condition and that the proteins in his urine were breaking down indicating that he was starving.
Our then contacted the hospital by phone and email (we were there and watched him do it) to tell them that he was sending us and the baby needed to be admitted and put on a drip Immediately.
We rushed him to the Hospital from our doctors office and we were greeted with a waiting room and a 7 hour triage event before we even got a bed and a drip that was only administered because My sister demanded that they do it after she had had enough of sitting in the waiting room with her dying infant in her arms.
The hospital denied ever being contacted by our GP and didn’t seem to want to listen anyone anyway because we told them so many times that he needed a drip in that 7 hours that we were sitting in the waiting room.
After waiting so many hours in a critical state with extreme fever the baby was completely non-responsive he couldn’t even hold his eye contact with you anymore.
My sister was so stressed out so she tried to flag down this nurse who took a look at him and In seeing that he was not responding well proceeded to say to my sister is your child development impaired implying that the reason why he was in that state was because he was Just mentally slow and not unresponsive due to burning a fever and an infected gut even though his charts had said that he was burning an extreme fever.
This is ludacris because we have nicknamed this kid jimmy neutron boy genius because he has fully taught himself how to read and count to 100 you can have full conversations with him and he has been also teaching himself to speak basic Italian and basic japanese from watching his you tube kids videos in other languages.
At this point this is when they made their incompetence very obvious.
Then my sister lost her cool at this point and that is when she demanded to speak to the doctor and she told them that she wanted the drip put in and that she wanted bloods done ASAP. The doctors advised her not to ask them to do that because we would be stressing his body out even further. My sister said just do it.
They then proceeded to further traumatise our baby and his dad who had swapped out at this point by trying to put the drip in his nose.
After having him refuse to let them put the tubes in his nose. My brother in law demanded that they do the intravenous cannula drip. By this time he had had enough and began to cry as he had reached his emotional breaking point and had to swap out with my sister.
When she came in they made rude comments about how it’s usually the mum who’s emotionally distraught in these situations which even if it was not intended to offend came across as emasculating.
After the drip was administered and the bloods came back reading an infection level of 300 when a normal person should be under 30 they finally admitted him to the Clancy ward which is an overflow ward where although his vitals were unstable and we had the night of hell watching him still burn up a writhe in pain we were finally getting the treatment we needed from the doctors and Nurses. They were polite and emotionally intelligent and supportive.
It was a totally different environment. And over the next two days nurses came in and out and watched him carefully whilst he slowly improved. Until they were confident that it was safe enough to send him home with us at 4pm on Saturday the 31st October.
I was there taking a Care shift When the doctor came in and told me what they had found in all the tests they had done and they had confirmed it was a campylobacter infection.
It didn’t click in my head at first when the doctor started asking me if we use a different chopping board to prepare chicken from the one we use for veggies?
I was like what? Raw chicken? We have been eating take away food since we moved house and that the only chicken that was prepared in our house was about a fortnight ago and our kitchen has been cleaned at least a dozen times before the infection symptoms started.
I then wracked my brain trying to remember what chicken he had eaten in the time frame of the infection and I remember that their's was the only chicken meal that anyone ate all of us ate at the of the week.
We then checked all the time stamps on our order and he we realised that he consumed the nuggets and exactly within 24 hours later we were calling the ambulance.
We then proceeded to notify door dash who apologised and we also send them the hospital documents. They were very good.
When we rang the offending store at Glenwood park N.S.W a young kid Answered the phone and he did not apologise or anything he just said send through proof and gave us an email address.
From their negligence causing this terrifying situation to happen and then the emergency ward at the children’s hospital being utterly incompetent the situation just went from bad to worse.
We never want to see this happen to anyone else let alone another child again so we will be notifying everyone one that we can try to make sure that someone takes responsibility for it happening and makes sure it doesn’t happen again.
Watching my baby nephew go through being a pin cushion and nearly dying has traumatised both the baby and his whole family.
We have lost work time and hundreds of dollars in medical bills, medication parking at the hospital and our emotional well being.
This smart little boy almost had his very bright future taken away from him and his family who loves him more that words can even express due to somebodies extreme negligence when preparing food in the hospitality industry and it should never happen because people’s lives are at stake.
We have contacted the department of fair trading and have left a voicemail for them to call us back as it’s Sunday.
We will also be seeking legal advise.
Below is the photos of hospital release form outlining the causes of our ordeal.
Thank you once again for your help. | Symptoms: Diarrhea, Nausea, Vomiting, Fever, Dehydration, Gas
