Family laments daughter's death

Andrea and Joshua Vielleux hold photographs of their deceased daughter, McKenna, while sitting with Dallas, 2 months and Charlemagne, 21 months, on Monday in Gallup. The parents are suing RMCH and two doctors over their alleged lack of treatment for their daughter who was eventually sent to Albuquerque where she died. [Photo by Jeff Jones/Indendent]

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — Andrea Vielleux knew her 2-year-old daughter, McKenna, was having no normal fever well before they made it to the hospital.

"She was always active no matter how (bad) she felt," Vielleux said. "Nothing slowed her down."

McKenna's fever was on the rise. Then, at about 2:30 on the afternoon of Nov. 8. 2005, the little girl started to shake.

"Her hands would lock up, and I noticed she started convulsing, and she started choking," she said. "By that time I was driving."

Vielleux, who lives in Ramah, was already in Gallup, and headed straight for the emergency room of Rehoboth McKinley Christian Hospital.

They arrived at 2:55. By 4:30 p.m. on Nov. 11, McKenna was pronounced dead.

What happened in between is now the subject of a lawsuit the family filed Sept. 29 against the hospital in McKinley County District Court. The family is accusing the hospital and two of its physicians who cared for McKenna, Maria Abad and Teicha Wilson, of providing inadequate care and failing to detect her meningitis.

A court date has yet to be set.

Hospital spokeswoman Elaine Bobo declined to respond to any specific allegations in the suit.

"Even though they've chosen to make it public by taking it to court," she said, the hospital felt restricted by federal law from doing the same.

"We extend our sympathy to the family, because this is a very difficult time," Bobo said, but "from a risk management point of view, we can't really comment."

Vielleux, holding her two-month-old daughter Dallas in her arms, just hopes the attention the lawsuit brings to her family's case helps spare some other family the same fate.

"Our main goal with the whole thing, with the whole thing bringing it to light," she said, "is that this doesn't happen to anybody else ... I wouldn't want anyone else to go through this. The pain is just terrible."

When Vielleux brought her daughter to the emergency room, the suit claims, doctors concluded that McKenna had suffered a febrile seizure, diagnosed her with a viral syndrome, and sent her home. But when the fever persisted, and McKenna began to vomit, mother and daughter were back at the hospital by 6:30 the next morning. This time she was admitted.

From the start, Vielleux had serious doubts about whether the hospital was doing enough.

"I remember calling my mom and telling her I feel I made the wrong choice because they stuck us in the corner and no one's coming to see us."

When she'd asked for a doctor, she said, nurses told her they had all left for the evening. And when she kept asking them to change McKenna's sheets because of her frequent bowel movements, they finally gave her the sheets and told her to do it herself.

"They just made it feel like she was a nobody," Vielleux said.

Again, she said, doctors tried to send them home, back to Ramah. But this time she wouldn't let them.

"I had to beg the doctors to keep her," she said. "I didn't want to take her back out there because I knew something was wrong."

Eventually, she said, the doctors realized it too. At about 8 p.m. on Nov. 10, they airlifted her to Albuquerque for more specialized care.

By then, McKenna's condition had gotten even worse.

"When I got there," Vielleux said, "(the doctor) said her condition was so debilitating they didn't understand why they waited so long to bring her here."

She said the doctors in Albuquerque told her the paperwork McKenna arrived with didn't make sense and were dumbfounded that her doctors in Gallup hadn't conducted more tests.

According to the lawsuit, doctors in Gallup made the first progress report of McKenna at 12:10 p.m., Nov. 9, and didn't make the next until 10:30 a.m., Nov. 10 more than 22 hours later. By then she had vomited at least half-a-dozen times. That she didn't role over, Vielleux said, should have been a sign to the doctors that her condition was getting worse.

"It broke my heart that I couldn't do anything for her," she said. "She was just like a little shell."

The suit accuses Abad, Wilson and the hospital of failing to notice McKenna's deteriorating condition, of not ordering and administering the antibiotics the girl needed, and failing to repeat laboratory tests that might have tipped them off to the cause of her fever.

"As a proximate result of the negligence and malpractice by defendants," the suit reads, "McKenna died prematurely and unnecessarily at the age of 2 years old."

While Bobo would not discuss specifics, she said the hospital was sticking by the conduct of its physicians.

"In general, if there is something ... unanticipated that should not have happened as a result of our error, whether it was one of our physicians, or the lab ... or wherever it came from, we would disclose that to the patient," she said.

"That wasn't the case in this lawsuit," she added. "The providers ... followed, really, what would be an appropriate level of care, and an appropriate care plan, so there really wasn't anything to disclose."

Whatever the case, McKenna's death, Vielleux said, has affected the entire family. She is survived by her mother, father Joshua, three sisters, and a brother.

"Our 4-year-old (Deisha), she completely reverted," Vielleux said, to where she's back to wearing diapers. "She was so close to her, everybody thought they were twins."

"Our son," she said, Zachary, 7, "he's gotten to the point where everything gets to him."

"It has belittled us so much," Vielleux said.

According to a 2000 report by the Institute of Medicine, it's latest, between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans die each year as a result of medical errors.