Video shows hospital drop newborn on head ‘like a sack of potatoes,’ Arizona mom says

An Arizona mother shared video this week that she said shows a hospital worker dropping her newborn premature baby on her head, as others scramble to keep the baby from falling further.

Monique Rodgers gave birth to twin girls on Feb. 14 at Chandler Regional Medical Center just outside of Phoenix, according to a Facebook post the new mother published Wednesday. Rodgers said the video she shared shows that “my daughter Morgan was dropped on her head due to the negligence of the staff.”

“I was never notified she was dropped nor were there any tests done due to them dropping her,” she said. “I would like to prevent this from happening to other children being born at this hospital.”

Rodgers said the child was kept in a neonatal intensive care unit for 12 days because she weighed just over three pounds and was born prematurely. She also said the hospital did an ultrasound on the child’s head on day five, but she wasn’t told that it was for the child’s low weight — and she never saw the test results.

The baby is suffering from a grade-one brain hemorrhage “and I am not sure if that was due to her being dropped or her low birth weight,” Rodgers said.

“I did not find out that this test was done and the results of this test until this past Saturday when I brought up a different concern to her doctor,” she wrote. “Please share my video.”

People did: By Friday morning, the video had been shared nearly 50,000 times on Facebook. It had more than a million views.

“I kind of promised myself that I would never watch that video again,” Rodgers said, according to ABC 15. “I feel like she was treated like a sack of potatoes.”

The twins’ father, Derrick, is the one who recorded the incident, the TV station reports. He said he was shaken when he saw what happened.

“It made me so mad. Like, I had to stop recording,” he told ABC 15, adding that he confronted the worker involved later. “I told him, ‘You dropped my baby.’ He had like a nonchalant look on his face. Then I showed him the video, and he had nothing to say after that.”

The hospital cited patient privacy laws in declining to comment on the incident with the baby, the Arizona Republic reports.

“The safety of our patients and their families is always our top concern,” the hospital said in a statement, according to the newspaper. “The medical team at Dignity Health Chandler Regional Medical Center takes this matter extremely seriously.”

Rodgers said she wants answers, particularly in light of the hemorrhage.

“I would like to know if this was due to her having a low birth weight or if it was due to her being dropped on her head,” she told ABC 15. “You know, an apology when it happened could’ve gone a long way.”

An obstetrician-gynecologist not involved in the case said that — even in babies that are not dropped — the kind of non-severe hemorrhage in the child’s brain isn’t out of the ordinary, CBS 5 reports.

“It’s certainly not abnormal, in fact, pretty common in low birth weight babies,” Dr. Greg Marchand told CBS 5.

Still, Marchand said, the medical staff should have handled the situation better.

“I did see the video and it was pretty disturbing,” Marchand told the TV station. “When you know that a mistake has happened, it is common practice to admit it as quickly as possible and give full disclosure to the family.”

In August, the baby is set to see a neurologist, CBS 5 reports. But the baby is doing well other than her tendency to shake, ABC 15 reports.

“They keep us up at night,” the mother told ABC 15. “They’re a lot of work.”

This story was originally published May 3, 2019 at 8:50 AM.