“It was the scariest time in my entire life,” Dennis Quaid says. “Those 41 hours were really frightening, but we had a happy ending.”

The 54-year-old actor isn’t talking about any of his 50-plus movies, but rather about the nightmarish episode in which his newborn twins almost died from an overdose of a drug they had been given while in a hospital for an infection.

“There are 100,000-plus people each year who die because of medical mistakes. It’s preventable,” he says.

Thomas Boone Quaid and Zoe Grace Quaid, children of Quaid and his third wife, Kimberly, were admitted to the hospital for a staph infection. The babies were scheduled to be given a pediatric blood thinner called Hep-lock to flush out their intravenous lines and prevent blood clots. Instead they were given two doses of Heparin, the adult version of the drug, which is 1,000 times stronger.

“The kids are doing fantastic now,” Quaid says. “I think that something good is really going to come out of it. I really appreciate how people’s thoughts and prayers were with us. We really felt them.”

He has chosen not to sue the hospital where the mistake was made, though he did pursue legal action against the drug maker for confusing the labelling. Instead, he and his wife have launched a foundation aimed at preventing such errors in the future.

“If nurses could just scan the bracelet on a patient and the medicine at the same time,” he says, “then mistakes would be so much less likely.”