PoCo mother says 2 local hospitals missed sick son’s diagnosis

A mother in the Tri-Cities is urging people to trust their gut when it comes to dealing with B.C.’s health-care system.

She’s sharing her young son’s experience after she says not one, but two hospitals, missed something critical on an X-ray, leaving him very ill.

Margo Levae says the ordeal began in late December 2022 when her son, who is neurodiverse, was complaining of a lot of pain.

“Communication is very difficult for him. He does have some words and he managed to point to his right side, his abdomen and say, ‘Ouch.’ He was extremely distressed, so we knew he needed care,” she recalled.

Levae explains she took her then-seven-year-old to the emergency room at Royal Columbian Hospital (RCH) but says they were sent home without any answers.

“They couldn’t find any reason, on examination, that led them to believe there could be any serious problems. They did send us home with a lab requisition, not for blood as we had requested, but for a urine sample, which we did the next day and there was nothing particular found.”

Less than two weeks later, they ended up at BC Children’s Hospital because her son wasn’t getting better. She explains they did an X-ray to see if he had swallowed something that wasn’t food.

“The way that he was presenting was really frightening to us as parents. It was very, very extremely different from [his] baseline,” the mother recalled.

Levae says the diagnosis was her son was constipated, “but what they missed was a lung infection that was visible on the X-ray.”

She says her son wasn’t admitted so they continued going back and forth to the hospital because his condition wasn’t improving, adding, another diagnosis was he had a cold.

In mid-January, Levae says her son was rushed back to BC Children’s because he was in severe pain and had coughed up a blood clot. The doctor handling their case was much more thorough.

“They did another X-ray and compared them, and the doctor decided to admit him immediately. The doctors and the residents from respiratory were very upfront with us. They showed us a comparison of the X-rays and said, ‘Look, this was missed.'”

Levae says she put her emotions aside to focus on her son’s care, which she described as “invasive,” noting, “he couldn’t walk more than five or six steps.”

She says when they were admitted, she heard the word sepsis used twice, but there was no follow-up.

“It stopped being used because the diagnosis he had was specific to the lung infection itself. It was very atypical they said. I noticed that term being used and when I thought about it, it did make sense. Everything from needing an emergency blood transfusion to different systems in the body. It’s scary to think about and I definitely think that if I hadn’t trusted my instincts … if the infection had gone into other parts of the body and escaped from the lung, that there’s a chance it could have been fatal.”

Levae says after being admitted, her son received great care but suggests the B.C. health-care system needs better tools to care for children who are neurodiverse.

“The actual assessment tools that they use … they’re not developed to be inclusive of children who aren’t typically abled. I think that was the biggest barrier in the end. The barriers I believe he encountered because their tools were simply not equipped to understand a child with extremely high pain tolerance, for example.”

Levae isn’t mad and acknowledges doctors are human and can make mistakes, but she wants answers and accountability.

She says she’s reached out to the Patient Quality Care Office and the College of Physicians and Surgeons of B.C. — the latter, she adds, is looking into the matter. Levae has also filed a complaint with the BC Human Rights Tribunal but is still waiting to hear back whether that’s gone ahead.

“We had a family doctor — that didn’t change the fact that the important systems that were supposed to catch things for my son, weren’t there.”

CityNews reached out to BC Children’s Hospital for comment but it’s not speaking about this case, citing privacy.