A 10-year-old girl from Australia, who developed a fever and complained of a sore throat, died after hospital doctors were unable to identify the condition causing her problem.
Bridget Klingberg knew something was wrong with her daughter Briony when she didn’t drink her tea. Bridget said her daughter loved to eat, so it was not usual for her not to have something to eat. Concerned, the mother took her daughter to several Adelaide Hills doctors who could not give the family any official diagnosis.
The parent went to a general practitioner first after she had difficulty swallowing and began to vomit. The GP diagnosed her with a throat infection and gave her antibiotics.
The girl’s condition continued to get worse.
The parents then went to the Adelaide Women’s and Children Hospital where doctors said the girl had ulcers on her throat. Briony was sent home not even an hour later and taken to another GP that prescribed her steroids to decrease the throat swelling.
Another GP requested blood tests at the hospital.
The next day, the little girl was unable to pee. Her parents were taking her back to the Women’s and Children’s Hospital. However, the girl suffered a seizure in the parking lot and passed away.
The coroner ruled that the little girl died because of organ failure because of the herpes simplex virus – the cause of every one of her symptoms.
Klingberg said the doctors only guessed about what was wrong with her daughter. She said if they even expressed a little concern that she should stay, they would have stayed.
However, one junior doctor who examined Briony and found the ulcers felt that she needed to be admitted into the hospital to find out the cause of the symptoms. However, since Dr. Alice Rogers was only a junior doctor, a senior doctor needed to sign off on the admittance. That doctor didn’t agree and sent the family home an hour later.
Klingberg said she is upset by her daughter’s death and wonders if doctors could have done more. She said the doctors kept telling her to come back if her daughter got worse. However, Klingberg said her daughter never really got worse; she just was not improving at all.
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