Dennis Quaid Opens Up About the Health Status of His Twins — 8 Years After a Hospital Overdose Almost Killed Them

Dennis Quaid (Photo: Getty Images)

Dennis Quaid’s twins are thriving.

Eight years after the pair nearly died in a horrible hospital mix-up — they were accidentally given a massive overdose of the blood thinner Heparin — they’re doing perfectly well. In fact, Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace Quaid are above average.

“They’re perfectly normal as could be now,” the The Art of More actor, 61, said on the Theo Von and Matthew Cole Weiss’s podcast, Allegedly, which will air on Tuesday. “They’re like head of their class.”

He continued, “You go to a dark place. But you gotta pull yourself away from that, you gotta remain optimistic. But everything turned out okay. We had a happy ending.”

Quaid and his wife Kimberly welcomed the twins via gestational carrier at in 2007. They were subsequently hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles due to a suspected infection. While there, the 12-day-old babies were given Heparin, an adult-strength blood thinner, instead of Hep-tock, a much-weaker version of the drug routinely given to clear IV lines in pediatric patients, and their lives hung in the balance.

During an interview with 60 Minutes in 2008, Quaid described the scene, saying, “Our kids are bleeding from everyplace that they’ve punctured. They were working on Boone, whose belly button would not stop bleeding — blood squirted across the room. It was blood everywhere. It was a life-and-death situation.”

Dennis, who has an adult son with his ex-wife Meg Ryan, later sued the hospital, along with his wife, and they received a $750,000 settlement. Cedars-Sinai was also fined $25,000 by the California Department of Public Health. Additionally, the Quaids sued the manufacturer of Heparin, Baxter Healthcare Corp., accusing it of negligence in packaging adult and pediatric doses in similar vials. The couple later started a foundation to look into preventative measures within the medical system.

“The hospital really stepped up and instituted a lot of patient safety that was very cutting edge and led the way with that,” Quaid said in the podcast. “So a lot of good things came out of it, and I think a lot of lives got saved because of that… But you know, it’s something that happens to you, you feel strongly about and you step up for it. It was really the kids that went through it and they were the ones that did it.”