A three-year-old girl has died after she fell into a coma following dental root canal work.
Finley Boyle, from Hawaii, had a heart attack after she was allegedly given the maximum dose of drugs at a dental surgery.
Her distraught mother, Ashley, took the agonising decision not to resuscitate Finley because she didn't want her to live in a vegetative state.
She is now planning to sue the dentist for negligence and dangerous conduct.
Ashley had taken Finley to the dentist on December 3 so the toddler could have four root canals and 10 cavity fillings.
But when Finley was allegedly given the maximum dosage of drugs, she went into cardiac arrest and couldn't be revived.
In the lawsuit, Ashley claimed that dentist Lilly Geyer and her Dentistry for Children practice administered too much anaesthetic and didn't follow protocol to closely monitor Finley's condition.
Her lawyer Richard Fried called the maximum dosages of five different drugs 'grossly excessive'.
And he cited the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry's standards which warned that young children should be monitored every five minutes and that an extra person should be there to help in case resuscitation is needed. He claimed the procedure on Finley broke both of those rules.
Instead of checking the girl's oxygen levels every five minutes, records show she wasn't checked for 26 minutes which explains why the brain damage was so severe.
When the girl went into cardiac arrest, a doctor from another office had to be brought in to perform CPR - which Ashley believes is the main reason her daughter fell into a coma.
She said: "Had it been initiated at the correct time, she'd be walking out of the hospital right now."
And she believes Finley may not have even needed the fillings after other mothers contacted her who got second opinions after visiting Dr Geyer and found out that her recommendations were 'either totally unnecessary or somewhat unnecessary'.
Ashley called the botched procedure a 'massive tragedy' that she and her family 'will have to deal with for the rest of our lives'.
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