If your child suffered from a preventable birth injury that resulted in fetal distress, a Chattanooga lawyer stands ready to help you and your child recover compensation. Because your child’s life has been altered and may require assisted living, a lawyer could help you by fighting for the compensation needed to plan for your child’s future needs. Trust in an attorney to help your child today.
What Is Fetal Distress?
Fetal distress is when a fetus, an unborn child, shows signs of a health problem. This may include increased or decreased heart rate, decreased movement, or changes in the mother’s fluid.
Fetal distress is indicated by an abnormally high or low heart rate and also by a lack of movement if the child has been fairly active and remains inactive for an unusual period of time. If there is a bloody discharge from the mother, that may be a sign of fetal distress.
Thankfully, fetal distress is frequently resolved. When it is resolved, there is no injury whatsoever and the child has a normal birth.
Preventing Fetal Distress
The main thing doctors need to do is pay close attention to the child and the monitoring. They need to make sure that the monitors are carefully watched and react when distress is observed. The reaction may include a change in medication or an emergency C-section. It can include different things depending on what the distress indicates.
Testing
There are several different types of monitoring of the baby’s heart rate. One can monitor whether the baby is getting enough oxygen and monitor the mother’s contractions and discharge. All of these things are used to indicate fetal distress.
Fetal heart rate is done usually by a strap around the mother’s abdomen that senses the heart rate. It is attached to a machine much like a person’s heart rate monitor, and it prints out a paper that gives the doctor a record of the heart rate and the speed of the heart rate.
Common Causes
There are many causes of fetal distress, but it is most often the result of a lack of oxygen to the child when the child does not get enough oxygen before, during, or after labor. There may be low oxygen levels in the mother’s blood, a compression of the umbilical cord, or the umbilical cord wrapped around the child’s neck.
Complications from Pitocin
Pitocin is a medication that increases contractions and starts the birth process or speeds it up. When a doctor chooses to schedule a delivery instead of waiting for the delivery to occur naturally, he or she administers Pitocin to the mother to start the contractions and start the delivery process. Pitocin could contribute to fetal distress if the Pitocin is not administered correctly. In the event that a child develops fetal distress in Chattanooga, a lawyer could help the victim and his or her parents recover compensation from the responsible parties.
Proving Negligence
A Chattanooga lawyer could look at the entire process from beginning to end and, with experience knows what is normal and what is abnormal. Attorneys focus on the things that are abnormal and use experts and professionals to understand what caused of the fetal distress and the injury.
An attorney may not be able to prove that the distress was the doctor or medical practitioner’s fault. However, attorneys could prove that the doctor should have relieved the distress and failed to do so, which resulted in an injury. They focus on the abnormal things that happened during the process and other things that should have been done.
Speak to One of Our Attorneys
When a doctor or other medical professional neglects his or her duty of care to you or your newborn, the injuries that result could be compensated for with a civil lawsuit. For fetal distress, Chattanooga lawyers stand ready to help you and your newborn recover. Reach out to one of our attorneys today.
