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Recent Blog Posts
Can Speech Therapy Help Children with Cerebral Palsy?
One of the most common symptoms of cerebral palsy is difficulty controlling muscles throughout the body. This can result in muscle spasticity, difficulty with mobility, and challenges with speaking, eating, and facial expressions. Many different professionals help children with cerebral palsy overcome their physical challenges and one of the most helpful of these professionals can be a speech therapist.
How Does Cerebral Palsy Impact Speech and Facial Movement?
Verbal communication delays are common in children with cerebral palsy - up to 75 percent, by some estimates. Limited control over face, tongue, and neck muscles can make it difficult for children with cerebral palsy to clearly express their feelings verbally. Fortunately, speech therapy proves effective for many, if not most, of these children and allows them to enjoy a higher quality of life.
Multicystic Encephalomalacia and Cerebral Palsy in Infants
All healthy humans have an important fluid called cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that surrounds the brain and spinal cords, protecting the crucial central nervous system. CSF helps prevent injury to these fragile parts of our body, cushioning them when they are injured by falls or impact injuries. CSF also plays an important role in transporting nutrients to the brain and taking away waste products.
Certain kinds of brain damage can cause pseudocysts, or fluid-filled sacs, to present in the brain’s white matter and neocortex after serious brain injuries that cause softening or loss of brain tissue. This condition is known as cystic or multicystic encephalomalacia. Instead of normal brain tissue, CSF fills these sacs, resulting in long-term brain damage, which, among other symptoms, commonly manifests as cerebral palsy. When this happens as a result of trauma to the mother or child during childbirth and is caused by a negligent healthcare provider, the parents of the child may be able to recover compensation.
What Are Common Causes of Postpartum Maternal Infection?
Before modern medicine, roughly a third of women died during pregnancy or childbirth. Current medical standards of care make this a number almost impossible to fathom; the vast majority of present-day childbirths go well, even when the mother and infant are facing serious complications. But when doctors, nurses, midwives, or hospitals are ill-prepared to respond to complex situations, mothers can still suffer serious injuries during and after childbirth.
One of the most common causes of postpartum injuries still associated with childbirth and its aftermath are maternal infections; while these are not always avoidable, they are often a consequence of poor medical treatment during childbirth, especially during complicated deliveries and recoveries. If left undetected or improperly treated, these infections can lead to serious injuries, including maternal death. To learn more about common causes of postpartum maternal infections, read on and then contact an Illinois birth injuries lawyer.
Should My Doctor Have Prevented My Child From Inhaling Meconium?
Before an infant is born, his bodily waste is sent through the umbilical cord and placenta to be processed and eliminated by the mother’s body. Once a child is born, however, his digestive tract begins functioning and the first poop a child produces is a thick tar-like substance called meconium. For first-time parents who are not expecting meconium, this can be alarming, but it is perfectly normal.
Rarely, an infant will begin pooping during labor. Meconium can be passed while a baby is still in the uterus, causing it to move around in the amniotic fluid surrounding the baby. Most of the time when this happens, the baby does not breathe in any meconium or amniotic fluid. But when meconium is inhaled, it can cause serious problems and requires urgent treatment from trained Illinois medical healthcare professionals.
Symptoms of Meconium Aspiration
My Doctor Did a Terrible Job Stitching My Perineal Tearing. Can I Sue?
The unfortunate reality for many mothers giving birth vaginally is that tearing injuries can easily occur. The skin of the vagina is biologically prepared to thin and stretch during delivery, but certain situations can make perineal tearing unavoidable. And while perineal tears are usually fairly easy to repair, poor medical treatment can make a mother’s recovery excruciatingly painful, sometimes requiring expensive further treatment and causing irreparable harm.
If your doctor committed a mistake that cause unnecessary perineal tearing, or if they improperly tried to repair perineal tearing, you may be able to take action.
What Kind of Mistakes Cause Unnecessary Perineal Tearing?
Mild to severe perineal tearing is common during delivery. Unfortunately, certain situations can worsen perineal tearing. These include:
- Improperly using forceps or vacuum suction
Can I Sue an Illinois Doctor for a Botched Abortion?
Abortion has always had a painful stigma for the women who seek it, even when their own lives are at risk. Due to recent political events, this threat may have increased, making it hard for women to talk about having an abortion and to seek the help and emotional support they need. When an abortion goes wrong and a woman is injured, this lack of support can leave a woman feeling like she has nowhere to turn for help.
Tragically, this lead leads to a lack of resources about what a woman can do after a injury resulting from a terminated pregnancy. Whether the pregnancy was terminated for medical or elective reasons does not matter; a doctor still has the same duty to provide a patient with the standard of medical care. Abortion clinics and doctors’ offices that provide abortions are subject to the same malpractice laws that any other doctor is subject to. If you were injured during an abortion, you are not alone. You may be able to take legal action to recover compensation for your suffering.
New Research May Help Grieving Parents Determine Cause of Multiple Miscarriages
Illinois parents-to-be must navigate a large amount of complex information as they prepare to welcome their child into the world. When tragedy strikes and pregnancy ends in miscarriage, parents often feel a challenging combination of grief, confusion, and anger. There may be many questions - Why did this happen? Is anyone responsible? Sadly, parents who try to preempt unhealthy pregnancies by testing for genetic anomalies may risk inadvertently ending the pregnancy when the test itself causes a miscarriage.
New Research from Yale Medicine tries to help grieving parents by looking for answers to difficult questions about miscarriages. If you have suffered from a miscarriage and are wondering whether your healthcare provider’s negligence caused or contributed to the miscarriage, call an Illinois birth injuries attorney.
Miscarriage Testing
Can Forceps Injure a Mother During Childbirth?
Doctors, nurses, midwives, and other childbirth medical specialists have an array of tools at their disposal to aid in ensuring babies are born safely. While the vast majority of deliveries do go smoothly, sometimes urgent intervention is needed. Delivering mothers have no choice but to put their faith in their attending doctor’s skill and knowledge.
Tragically, not all doctors are as educated or dedicated to their patients’ well-being as they should be. And even when a mistake is just that - an accident - the results can be devastating. One kind of tool that has the potential to cause great harm to both mother and child during delivery is forceps. Forceps look like a large pair of tongs that are meant to fit around a child’s head to help guide them out of the birth canal. While forceps save lives, when used incorrectly, they can cause several types of maternal injuries.
Does Stem Cell Therapy Show Promise for Children with Autism?
The process of pregnancy and birth ends well for most children, but it also presents a long period of complicated genetic development during which a child’s body and brain are fragile and susceptible to injuries. Many of these injuries can happen because of recklessness or carelessness on the part of childbirth healthcare providers, and a surprising number of injuries appear to be linked to a higher risk of developing autism.
While there are many treatments and therapies for autism, a child with autism may need medical, social, and educational support for the rest of their life. If your child suffered from a birth injury and now has autism, you may want to see whether you can take action against the person or organization responsible.
Which Birth Injuries May Cause or Contribute to Autism?
Several birth injuries are correlated with much higher rates of autism in young children, although it is difficult to establish a direct link between one particular occurrence and the later manifestation of autism. However, birth injuries that are frequently associated with autism later on include:
What Is Fetal Macrosomia and How Does It Happen?
One of the most incredible aspects of the miracle of new human life is the fact that, for the vast majority of pregnancies, nothing goes wrong at all. Out of the millions of cells that must divide and developmental processes that must go perfectly, for most families, there are no complications. But when unusual circumstances present themselves, a team of educated, fast-thinking doctors can make the difference between barely averted disaster and tragedy. Some of the things that go wrong are caused by genetic or physical conditions; others are caused by medical caregiver incompetence; and still others, like fetal macrosomia, are a combination of the two. Read on to learn about this condition and how it can appear in Illinois birth injuries.
Understanding Fetal Macrosomia
Infants with fetal macrosomia are more commonly known simply as “big babies.” An infant whose weight is in the top 10 percent of all fetal weights before birth has fetal macrosomia - usually, this means the child weighs more than about nine pounds. While nearly everyone knows someone who gave birth to a particularly large infant without consequence, fetal macrosomia can pose serious health complications to both the baby and the mother.
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