What Are the Common Signs and Symptoms of a Birth Injury?

A lot of times there are things called Apgar scores that will be really low. Those are tests that are done on a baby right at the time of birth. The color of the baby may be pale or blue, even as opposed to pink when a baby’s born healthy. Whether or not the baby is breathing can be a sign or symptom that something went wrong. Whether or not the baby has to be resuscitated can be a sign or symptom that something went wrong. Imaging studies of the brain, oftentimes MRIs, are done when the doctors suspect that something is wrong with the baby. They’ll do an MRI, and that can provide really, really important information to determine what exactly went wrong. From there, we can sort of extract information looking at the medical records and seeing, you know, what are the fetal heart rate strips actually saying. We are able to not only get them on a piece of paper; we’re also able to get the fetal heart rate strips put into a program so they run continuously just like they look in a hospital, and that really gives us a lot of information as to what’s going on. Because if we look at the strips and we see repetitive or different types of decelerations and we look at the actual substantive medical records and no one’s commenting on it, no one’s calling the doctor, the nurses aren’t doing anything, the doctor’s not at the bedside, then we can start to question what was happening. Then we could start to put the story together.