Timing a Brain Injury
There are many ways to time a brain injury to a fetus that suffered from Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy (a lack of oxygen or lack of blood flow). This is necessary in mal practice legal cases where determining levels of responsibility will often depend on establishing the sequence of events and timing. The case will often depend upon weather the nurse or doctor or hospital under review had sufficient warning of the events that occurred. If they did, then they should bear responsibility for the subsequent injury to the baby. If they didn’t have warning, they should not be held accountable.
There are various ways you can time a Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathic insult to a baby’s brain:
- Look, when did the baby have seizures;
- check the laboratory values – specifically nucleated red blood cells;
- Radiographic studies – sonograms, head MRI’s or CAT scans are useful to help time the injury.
And of course you want to check the fetal heart rate tracings. Because depending upon what the fetal heart tracings show, that can help you time and insult or injury to a baby’s brain. It is usually not one cause in isolation that helps time an injury, but rather a combination of factors. In other words the laboratory factors, the factors involving the radiographic studies, the fetal heart rate tracings, putting all of those factors and others together, help one time when an injury Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathic injury occurred during labor and delivery.
