Source: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / Getty
We’re telling you right now, this story is about to run your blood pressure up high.
Timika Thomas wanted a big family and after birthing four healthy children, she and her husband decided to try for one more. However, according to 8NewsNow, that dream never came to fruition on account of an egregious “human error” made by some very incompetent pharmacy technicians. In 2019, after suffering two ectopic pregnancies and fallopian tube removal, Thomas chose to undergo the process of invitro fertilization in an attempt to create her fifth and final child. After taking several injections, Thomas thought it best to give her “butt cheek a rest” and switch over to a vaginal suppository and prescription drugs to get her body to produce pregnancy hormones. This is when things went very left.
Upon taking the meds that she was given at the CVS branch at W. Craig Road and Camino Al Norte in North Las Vegas…
“I started cramping really bad,” Thomas said.
No stranger to the IVF process, she expected cramping, but this was not the pain she anticipated.
“My cramping went beyond that,” she said. “It was extreme. It was painful.”
Upon checking the bottle and looking up the name of the meds online, Thomas made the heartbreaking discovery…
“The first thing I read is it’s used for abortions,” Thomas said.
She continued:
“They just killed my baby,” she said to herself at the time. “Both my babies, because I transferred two embryos.”
The chain of events that led to that moment can only be described as an unfunny comedy of errors. First, a pharmacy tech assumed she knew the name of the meds that Thomas was seeking and put the wrong drug into the computer system. A second pharmacist failed to catch the initial error. A third pharmacist failed to offer Thomas any counsel about the drugs when she went to pick them up.
“It [the error] would have been caught because then they would have had to have the medicine in their hand,” Thomas said. “And they would have said, ‘Oh, this is Misoprostol or Cytotek, have you taken this before?’ And I would have said ‘no.’ ”
Thomas would subsequently testify and file a complaint with the Nevada State Board of Pharmacy that doled out an relatively light punishment for CVS and the techs involved by issuing a $10,000 fine (the maximum allowed by the state) and temporarily suspending the licenses of the techs until restitution in the form of fines and education are completed.
CVS issued the following statement to 8NewsNow regarding the incident;
“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. 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 in order to continuously improve quality and patient safety.”
Let Timika Thomas tell it, “All I got was a sorry…it will never be good enough.” We hope that she can gather the resources to sue the dog s#!t out of CVS of her pain, suffering, and emotional distress.
