[mooman219]

This just sounds like poor planning. I believe that if the parents prepared a list of people who met the relevant criteria and sought pre-approval at local hospitals for respecting their wishes, then this would be a non-story. I assume this is a possibility given there are services that let you use your own stored blood for transfusions that's donated if close to expiration. It sounds like they did not seek any form of pre-approval. This is relatively unsympathetic, no one plans to have their child need heart surgery on short notice, but if the parents have specific requests that they're worried will not be honored, then make sure of that before hand.

From the article, it sounds like the parent's blocked testing unrelated to bloodwork and transfusions as well. Many hospitals are willing to work with strange last minute requests (to some degree), but if they were being otherwise difficult then that reduces any patience the staff has to go out of their way to accommodate anything outside of the standard procedure.