A baby admitted to hospital for routine treatment of a "sticky eye" infection has been left with irreversible brain damage after a doctor accidentally added toxic potassium chloride to an antibiotic injection.
Aaran Pepper, then just 10 days old, was being treated with Penicillin for the condition, which affects millions of babies. Jonathan Golding, a junior doctor at Wythenshawe Hospital in Manchester, meant to dilute the drug with saline solution but allegedly confused it with potassium compound.
The baby's heart stopped immediately. Emergency resuscitation failed to save him from severe brain damage that has left him with serious mental and physical handicaps.
"I will never forget the moment it happened. We thought he was dead," said Mark Pepper, Aaron's father, last week. "I was holding him in my arms when they injected him. He turned blue and stopped breathing."
Aaron never fed from a bottle again. He was kept alive on a life support machine in intensive care for 3 days and fed through a tube into his stomach for months afterwards.
Three months later - when it was clear that Aaron's condition was irreversible - the Peppers say that they were told by the Health Authority "Go home, look after your other children and forget about him".
However Mark (32) and his wife Tara (27), from Manchester, refused to leave their baby. Instead, they gave up work to care for him and their 5 other children, who are all healthy, while waiting for compensation.
Five years later, they are still waiting. Now they begun legal action against the hospital which has never denied responsibility. It says it needed to wait to see how badly Aaron had been affected - but the family says it is already obvious that the accident was devastating.
Among his many problems are bouts of aggression that make him prone to injuring himself and others because he has no reaction to pain. He has already broken the collar bone of his sister (7), and hurt his other siblings by pushing them down the stairs.
He cannot talk, suffers from epilepsy and has a form of hyperactivity which means he needs only 4 hours sleep a night and is always awake between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m.
"He is still my little boy and we have to get on with it, but it is very difficult to look after him," his mother said. "I have to stay up with him at night because he is so destructive. I have just trained myself to need as little sleep as he does."
Aaron was being put at the back of the queue for treatment, she said. "He needs more speech therapy, physiotherapy and treatment for his respiratory problems, but he just is not receiving it. We are really getting desperate."
The case highlights weaknesses in the system that requires junior doctors to work very long hours. Potassium chloride is usually supplied in glass files while saline comes in sachets or large packs, but Goldin had been on duty for 14 hours. Last week he declined to discuss the incident.
A spokesman for South Manchester University Hospitals NHS Trust could not comment on why no interim payment had been offered but said the case was not straightforward. "Obviously it was a tragic incident, but we had to wait a certain time before a proper assessment of the child could be done."
A solicitor whose firm is acting for the Peppers, said cases were being delayed by prolonged waits for expert medical opinions. Some doctors take up to 18 months to produce reports.
"It is true that it can take time to evaluate the difficulties of a brain damaged child, but these cases should take no more than 2 years to settle," A solicitor at Alexander Harris said.
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