In the fluorescent-lit corridors of UF Health Shands Children’s Hospital in Gainesville, Florida—a sprawling pediatric sanctuary where the air hums with the beeps of monitors and the soft sobs of worried parents—the morning of March 2, 2024, began with the innocent urgency of a child’s fever. De’Markus Jeremiah Page, a bright-eyed 2-year-old bundle of curiosity with chubby cheeks and a penchant for stacking blocks into wobbly towers, had been rushed to the emergency room the night before, his tiny body wracked by a common respiratory virus that turned a playful weekend into a parent’s nightmare. His mother, Brittni Page, 28, a devoted single mom juggling shifts as a medical billing clerk in nearby Ocala, paced the linoleum floors, her heart a knot of maternal fear as nurses hooked her son to IV lines and oxygen masks. De’Markus, or “Marky” to those who loved him, responded well at first—his fever breaking under antibiotics, his giggles returning as he clutched a worn stuffed elephant from home. By the second day, doctors prescribed a routine supplement: oral potassium phosphate at 1.5 millimoles (mmol) twice daily, a standard electrolyte boost to stabilize his levels after the infection’s toll. It was a dose as unremarkable as apple juice at bedtime, meant to fortify a toddler’s fragile recovery. But in a split-second lapse that would unravel lives forever, a doctor’s errant keystroke—deleting a critical decimal point—ballooned the order to 15 mmol, ten times the safe amount. What followed was a cascade of catastrophe: De’Markus’s heart seizing in hyperkalemia’s toxic grip, his young body convulsing into cardiac arrest, and a frantic scramble by staff that came too late. On March 3, after 48 agonizing hours of machines breathing for him and monitors flatlining hope, Brittni made the unbearable choice to withdraw life support. De’Markus Page—vibrant, verbose for his age, with a future scripted in playground chases and preschool finger paints—slipped away at 10:17 a.m., his elephant tucked under his arm, leaving a void that echoes through a Gainesville courtroom today. A wrongful death lawsuit filed November 11, 2025, against the hospital and the attending physician lays bare the chilling mechanics of the error: a misplaced cursor, an unchecked screen, and a system’s fragility that turned a routine remedy into a fatal poison. “He was my everything,” Brittni whispers in a tear-choked affidavit, her words a dagger to the heart of medical accountability. “A decimal point shouldn’t steal a child’s breath.”

The Page family’s story, woven into the fabric of Ocala’s working-class tapestry—a town of horse farms and highway diners where single moms like Brittni scrape by on grit and grace—had always pulsed with resilient joy. De’Markus, born on a balmy August day in 2021 amid the laughter of a backyard baby shower, was the unexpected gift after Brittni’s high school sweetheart drifted away post-graduation, leaving her to navigate motherhood solo at 23. Raised in a cozy two-bedroom rental off State Road 40, amid the scent of her famous cornbread and the chaos of Duplo bricks, Marky was a whirlwind of wonder: his first word “Mama” at 9 months, his obsession with “Wheels on the Bus” videos that had neighbors knocking for encores. Brittni, with her no-nonsense bob and tattooed forearms etched with “Warrior Mom,” balanced 40-hour weeks at a billing firm—fingers flying over keyboards to code claims for heart procedures she could only pray her son never needed—with evenings of storytime and splash baths. “He was my sidekick,” she recalls in the lawsuit’s narrative, a 50-page tome of timelines and tears filed in Alachua County Circuit Court. “Woke up singing, went to bed dreaming. That virus? Just a bump—we’d beat it like always.” Admitted to Shands on March 1 after a pediatrician flagged dehydration and labored breathing—symptoms of RSV, a seasonal scourge that hospitalizes thousands of toddlers annually—De’Markus perked up under care: IV fluids flushing the fever, a cartoon mural in his room sparking giggles as he pointed at dancing dinosaurs. Potassium phosphate, a clear liquid elixir to replenish electrolytes depleted by illness, was ordered at 1.5 mmol BID (twice daily), a pediatric staple safer than baby aspirin.

The error, as chilling in its simplicity as a dropped stitch unraveling a sweater, occurred at 11:01 a.m. on March 2. Dr. Elena Vasquez, a 42-year-old resident in her third year of pediatric fellowship at the University of Florida’s teaching hospital, logged into the Epic electronic health record system—a digital behemoth relied on by 250 million patients nationwide—for a routine adjustment. De’Markus’s labs from the prior evening showed mild hypokalemia (low potassium), a common aftermath of viral battles, prompting a tweak to maintain balance. But in the haste of a 12-hour shift juggling 18 patients—consults overlapping like storm clouds—Vasquez’s cursor slipped. The original order: 1.5 mmol. The new entry: 15 mmol. No alert triggered; no double-check from the charge nurse amid the ward’s symphony of pagers and IV pumps. At 11:45 a.m., Nurse Tamara Ellis, 35, a five-year veteran with a soft spot for singing lullabies to fussy kids, measured and mixed the dose from the pharmacy’s automated dispenser, administering it via oral syringe into De’Markus’s sippy cup, flavored with cherry to mask the tang. “He slurped it like juice,” Ellis later deposed, her voice quavering in a deposition transcript. “No flags, no warnings—the system said go.” Within 20 minutes, the overdose ignited: hyperkalemia flooding his bloodstream, potassium ions spiking to lethal levels, disrupting the heart’s electrical rhythm like a short-circuited fuse box. De’Markus stiffened, his eyes widening in confusion, a guttural cry escaping as arrhythmia gripped his chest—a massive myocardial infarction in a heart too small for such savagery.

The code blue blared at 12:07 p.m., a cacophony of overhead pages—”Pediatrics, stat!”—summoning a swarm of white coats to Room 412. Brittni, dozing in the recliner after a red-eye vigil, bolted awake to the defibrillator’s whine and her son’s seizing form, his elephant tumbling to the floor. “What did you do to my baby?” she screamed, restrained by a social worker as the team intubated and shocked—paddles thumping his 28-pound frame, epinephrine surging through lines. Vasquez, face ashen, reviewed the chart mid-chaos: the decimal’s ghost staring back, 15 mmol glaring like a verdict. “Oh God, I fat-fingered it,” she allegedly muttered to the attending, Dr. Marcus Hale, a 55-year-old pediatric cardiologist whose steady hands had saved dozens from similar storms. Efforts redoubled—dialysis rigged to flush the toxin, calcium gluconate boluses to stabilize the membranes—but De’Markus’s heart, overwhelmed by the electrolyte tsunami, fibrillated into chaos, ventricles quivering uselessly. Brittni, barricaded in the hall, pounded the door: “Fight, Marky—Mommy’s here!” By 1:15 p.m., after 68 minutes of futile frenzy, Hale emerged, scrubs sweat-soaked, to deliver the limbo: “He’s in refractory arrest—brain activity minimal. We can prolong, but…” The room fell silent save for the monitors’ dirge, Brittni collapsing into her mother’s arms, Rosa Page, 52, a retired cafeteria worker who’d driven three hours from Ocala at dawn. “He was supposed to get better,” Brittni wailed, her world contracting to the beeps fading to flatline.

The 48 hours that followed were a vigil of velvet ropes and ventilators, De’Markus’s room a shrine of wilted balloons from well-wishers and machines mimicking miracles. EEGs traced erratic squiggles, a harbinger of anoxic brain injury—the oxygen-starved neurons dying in cascades, robbing the toddler of speech, movement, self. Brittni, flanked by family and a hospital ethicist, weighed the unthinkable: continuation as cruelty, withdrawal as mercy. “He wouldn’t want tubes forever,” she decided on March 3, her signature on the DNR form a seismic shift. At 10:17 a.m., as sunlight slanted through blinds patterned with zoo animals, the vent silenced, the drips halted. De’Markus’s chest rose once, twice—a final sigh—then stilled, his elephant placed in Brittni’s arms as she rocked his cooling form, whispering nursery rhymes into silence. “My boy’s gone,” she murmured to the chaplain, a hollow echo in the hall where other parents paced for cures.

The lawsuit, unsealed November 11, 2025, in Alachua County Circuit Court—filed by Brittni and Rosa against UF Health Shands, Vasquez, Ellis, and Hale—unfurls the error’s anatomy with surgical precision, a 75-page indictment blending medical jargon and maternal fury. Attorney Jordan Dulcie, a Gainesville malpractice bulldog with a track record of $20 million verdicts, alleges “systemic negligence” in the hospital’s Epic implementation: no mandatory second-sign for pediatric doses over 5 mmol, outdated training modules from 2021, and a culture of “hurry sickness” in understaffed wards post-COVID. “This wasn’t malice—it was madness in motion,” Dulcie thundered at a presser outside the courthouse, flanked by Brittni clutching Marky’s elephant. “A decimal deleted, a life deleted. Shands is a teaching hospital—teach accountability, or pay for the lesson.” Vasquez, defended by the hospital’s risk management team, claims “human error amid high volume,” her deposition a tearful mea culpa: “I reviewed it twice—or thought I did. The screen glitched; fatigue from 18-hour rotations.” Ellis, the nurse, broke down in her statement: “I trusted the order—kids’ meds are my lifeblood. Seeing him seize… I’ll never unsee it.” Hale, the cardiologist, points to protocol gaps: “Epic’s alerts are optional for electrolytes—shouldn’t be.”

Shands, a $2.5 billion behemoth affiliated with UF’s med school, faces a firestorm: state health department probes launched November 12, Joint Commission accreditation reviews pending, whispers of a $50 million settlement to preempt trial. The hospital’s CEO, Dr. G. Douglas Andersen, issued a mea culpa video: “De’Markus’s loss is our deepest failure. We’re overhauling safeguards—mandatory overrides, AI dose-checks, resident caps at 12 hours.” But Brittni, her eyes hollowed by grief’s gravity, seeks more than money: “I want his name on every chart, every click—’Remember Marky: Check the decimal.’ He was my spark; let him light the way.” Community vigils swell at Ocala’s Marion Oaks Park, purple lanterns (Marky’s favorite crayon) glowing weekly, Brittni speaking through sobs: “He’d chase bubbles till dark—now we chase justice for him.” A Change.org petition—”Mandate Pediatric Dose Alerts Nationwide”—hits 150,000 signatures, lawmakers like Rep. Angie Nixon vowing bills in Tallahassee.

As November’s chill nips Florida’s warmth, Brittni soldiers on in their rental—a half-empty crib, Duplos gathering dust—her billing shifts shadowed by therapy and toddler grief groups. “Holidays without his ‘Ho-ho’—it guts me,” she confides to a support circle. The lawsuit’s discovery phase looms, depositions set for January, trial eyed for fall 2026. Vasquez, on leave, attends counseling; Ellis, reassigned to adult floors, wears a “Marky Memorial” bracelet. In Gainesville’s glow, where young lives flicker under halos of hope and hazard, De’Markus Page’s story endures—a decimal’s deadly dance, a mother’s unyielding roar. One small point, one vast void: in medicine’s maze, the margin for error is measured in heartbeats.