Birth injuries can be physically apparent such as bruising and swelling on your baby’s head, face, shoulders, or torso. Often times, these are superficial injuries that are not permanent and heal within a few weeks. However, there are more serious birth injuries that can occur shortly before, during, or after delivery that can cause devastating neurological injury such as cerebral palsy and Erb’s palsy.
Cerebral palsy is an injury to the brain that can be caused from a multitude of conditions associated with a lack of oxygen to the baby’s brain. These conditions can occur before, during, or after delivery and can cause irreparable harm and permanent damage to the baby’s brain resulting in different degrees of cognitive, speech, and motor deficits. Some infants may be diagnosed shortly after birth, while other cases may not be apparent until the child is older and not reaching developmental milestones.
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Some of the answers that we can provide when we look at your child’s CP case are, was there an untreated infection? Was there a period of time when the nurses should have responded sooner or quicker? Are there things on the fetal monitor strip that showed that there were heart rate patterns of the baby or the mom that weren’t responding to interventions? Were there medicines that should have been reduced, such as pitocin? Was there signs or an indication of a placental Eruption? Should the doctor had been called earlier to perform an emergency C-section? Was the mom delivering a child by a vaginal birth when you had a previous C-section? So there are a lot of different indications that we can look at to see if the doctor or nurses should have performed things differently under the circumstances.
