A Las Vegas woman says that CVS Pharmacy mistakenly gave her abortion pills instead of her IVF hormones and killed her two babies in 2019 — and all they did was say “sorry.”
Timika Thomas says that she and her husband were trying to add another baby to their family of four but that she had been struggling to get pregnant.
Thomas is in her 30s and has suffered two ectopic pregnancies, leading to her having her fallopian tubes removed. Ultimately, they opted to go down the expensive path of in vitro fertilization.
She had two eggs placed inside her and needed hormones to kickstart the process and “trick” her body into realizing it was pregnant. Instead, CVS gave her Misoprostol, which induces abortions.
“They just killed my baby,” Thomas told herself at the time, according to a report from Fox Business. “Both my babies, because I transferred two embryos.”
The drugs she was given caused intense cramping, “It was extreme. It was painful,” she said.
Fox Business reports, “one technician – incorrectly believing she knew the generic name for the brand prescribed by the doctor – entered the wrong name into the prescription. One pharmacist did not catch the error, and another pharmacist failed to counsel Thomas when she came to pick up her medication.”
Thomas went to the Nevada State Board of Pharmacy in September and had the pharmacists’ licenses suspended.
“Those pharmacists took responsibility for the ruinous failure, but not before placing some of the blame on their employer, CVS,” 8 News Now reports. “According to one of the pharmacists involved, the business was asking clinicians to make critical decisions without allowing the time required to make good judgment calls. She told the board that CVS pressured her to meet certain “metrics” and reduced staff while increasing the workload. She said she was overwhelmed.”
8 News Now reports, “Thomas went to the pharmacy board for answers. The board sanctioned the two involved pharmacists, one for failing to consult with the patient before leaving with the prescription and the other for missing errors made by other CVS technicians.”
“We’ve apologized to our patient for the prescription incident that occurred in 2019 and have cooperated with the Nevada Board of Pharmacy in this matter,” CVS told Fox News in a statement.
“The health and well-being of our patients is our number one priority, and we have comprehensive policies and procedures in place to support prescription safety. Prescription errors are very rare, but if one does occur, we take steps to learn from it to continuously improve quality and patient safety,” the company said.
The pharmacy board fined CVS $10,000, the maximum allowed amount for a pharmacist error.
