Mother whose 3-day old baby received burns at Victoria hospital demands answers

Tracy Louie says she knew something was wrong after her newborn son let out an ear-shattering scream during a check-up on Sunday morning.

Louie had given birth three days earlier at Victoria General Hospital and said a nurse came in to check her baby's blood sugar levels.

"To do that, she put a hot cloth on my son's foot … [and] left it there for a couple of minutes," Louie, 31, said. 

"He screamed at the top of his lungs. He was really, really hurt."

Louie, who was sitting in the chair beside her baby while the check-up was taking place, didn't know what had caused so much pain.

"He was just really crying, you know I, I didn't think that she put that hot of a cloth on him at the time," she said. 

But within hours, her baby's foot deepened to a bright red colour and blisters started forming all over his foot and toes. 

"He had bubbles of fluid develop on the bottom of his foot and on his toes and he ended up breaking the bubbles on his toes, which exposed ... a lot of his skin underneath," Louie said. 

Please note the following is an image some people may find disturbing.

Island Health says while they cannot disclose information about patients, they are aware of the incident and are in close contact with the family.

"We take concerns about patient care very seriously. We acknowledge how distressing this situation is for the family and we are doing everything we can to determine what happened and how we can prevent this from happening again," said a statement from the health authority to CBC News.

Louie, however, says she is "maddened" by the hospital's followup, saying hospital staff initially didn't believe that a nurse could be to blame and even asked if Louie had hurt her son.

"[They said] the nurse wouldn't have done that and they asked if I scraped him on something initially. I told them no and that it was ridiculous that they would even say that," she said.

"I'm appalled by the whole thing."

While the health authority investigates the incident, Louie says she hopes the nurse is fired.

"I just need [my baby] to get justice for this," Louie said. "She should know how to do her job."