Pharmacy Dispensed Wrong Drug to 4-Year-Old Girl

An Arkansas family is taking legal action against a pharmacy for dispensing the wrong medication to a 4-year-old child.

Acuera Sloan was supposed to receive cyproheptadine to treat her stomach pain, KARK 4 News reported. Instead, she received Maxzide, but neither the pharmacy staff nor the child’s parents realized the mistake before it was too late.

Acuera’s father picked up his daughter’s prescription from Fred’s Pharmacy in Marianna, Arkansas, and observed that the medication had the correct name and patient information.

The father hurried home to give Acuera the medicine because she had been refusing to eat or drink and was crying “all day, every day,” the family told KARK 4 News. (The child had been in and out of Le Boehner Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, for stomach problems.)

After taking the medication from the pharmacy, Acuera told her parents that she could not breathe and was vomiting and experiencing diarrhea. Because her parents thought it was the stomach problem causing her symptoms, they decided to give Acuera a second dose of the medication 5 hours later.

“That’s when it really got bad,” Acuera’s mother, Quarnicia Sloan, told KARK 4 News. “She went to saying her legs were hurting, her head was hurting. She couldn’t sleep.”

That’s when the Sloan family realized that the pills were not what the doctor ordered.

The family reported the incident to Fred’s Pharmacy’s corporate office back in November 2015. However, it allegedly took the pharmacy 3 months to respond with an offer of $500 to help cover medical expenses, KARK 4 News reported.

“You can't put a price on my child’s life, but I know $500 is not right,” Quarnicia Sloan told KARK 4 News. “You put my child at risk—her health, her life.”

While Acuera has since recovered, her mother said that she would check all information on prescription medication going forward.