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Angela Salvatore had been away from her father’s hospital bed for a little over an hour when she said she received a frantic call from a nurse, pleading with her to calm him down.

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After rushing back to her room, she says ashen-faced staff gave her an alarming message: her father had mistakenly received 10 times the prescribed dose of an antipsychotic medication.

As the night wore on, Salvatore says she and her mother watched helplessly as her father, Benito Salvatore, went through waves of confusion, agitation and eventually delirium. Then, less than 12 hours after the hospital was called, her heart stopped, she said. He could not be resuscitated.

“We were numb. We were completely numb,” Angela Salvatore said in an interview last week. “The loss is unquantifiable and the grief is deep.”

She now says she wants accountability for what happened to her father, an Italian immigrant who arrived in Canada as a young man in the 1960s.

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In a lawsuit filed earlier this month, the family alleges that Benito Salvatore suffered intense pain and shock and ultimately died prematurely on July 31 due to negligence that led to a series of injuries. medical errors and failures.

It alleges, among other things, that nurses failed to properly confirm the prescribed dosage and that doctors downplayed the seriousness of the alleged error, failing to recognize that “this was a potentially fatal error and endangering life”.

The suit names as defendants Niagara Health, which operates the St. Catharines-Ont. the hospital where Benito Salvatore was treated, as well as four doctors and two nurses involved in his care.

None of the allegations have been tested in court and no statement of defense has yet been filed. Niagara Health said it cannot comment on a matter currently before the courts.

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The statement said Benito Salvatore went to the emergency room on July 23 after experiencing, among other things, worsening shortness of breath. He was admitted to the hospital and underwent a number of tests and treatments over the following week, including for a type of heart failure and sleep apnea, the statement said.

On July 30, a doctor prescribed quetiapine, an antipsychotic drug known by the brand name Seroquel, the document states. The prescription was for 12.5 milligrams, to be taken orally once a day, in the evening, it is specified.

The lawsuit alleges that one or more nurses failed to properly read or document the order. He further alleges that a nurse failed to check the dosage and was grossly negligent in dispensing the medication.

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That nurse then realized she had made “a serious dispensing error” and gave Salvatore 125 milligrams of the medication, according to the statement.

Doctors, it claims, “failed to treat, recognize, investigate and/or aggravate Benito’s critical medical situation in a timely and urgent manner.”

Salvatore, meanwhile, became agitated, confused and hypoxic, a condition in which the body’s tissues have low levels of oxygen, the document states. He was placed under restraint, it is said.

Salvatore was found without vital signs on July 31 and attempts at resuscitation were unsuccessful, the statement said.

Angela Salvatore said she and her mother were outside the hospital room as medical staff tried to revive her father. “I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to him,” she said.

Both “relive the trauma daily” of those hours, and the experience destroyed their trust in the health care system, she said.

“It was a supreme botch job… for my father-in-law,” she said.

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