Warning: This story includes images that may be disturbing

An Edmonton mother is accusing the Stollery Children’s Hospital of negligence after an IV line caused serious injury to her three-year-old daughter’s hand.

Jalena Gunther said her daughter Emmy underwent open heart surgery at the hospital earlier this week and was hooked up to intravenous fluids on Friday night. Gunther said her daughter started “fussing and crying” after getting the IV, but “no one else seemed concerned.”

Gunther had arranged for her mother to stay with Emmy at the hospital on Friday night, so that she could get some rest after not sleeping for days.

“My mom texted me half an hour later saying something is not right,” Gunther told CTV Edmonton.

She said it wasn’t until the next morning that a nurse discovered the IV line had slipped out of Emmy’s vein and into the skin. That left the little girl’s hand swollen and covered in blisters.

In a Facebook post, Gunther alleges that three different nurses came into Emmy’s room that night and all of them missed the problem.

Gunther alleges the nurses were “negligent” because they didn’t properly check Emmy’s IV injection site.

She told CTV Edmonton that her daughter will need more surgeries to repair the damage to her hand, and it is not clear if she will ever regain full function of it.

Emmy, who has Down syndrome, mainly communicates through sign language.

“And if she's unable to fully use that hand, it's going to limit her speech and her ability to communicate,” her mother said.

In a statement to CTV Edmonton, Alberta Health Services said it has started a quality review of the care Emmy received at Stollery Children’s Hospital

“We are very sorry about the complication that this little girl has experienced,” the statement said. “Our standards of care should not result in this type of complication for any of our patients.”

Gunther said she would like to see the night-shift nurses and doctors responsible for her daughter’s care reprimanded. She also wants to see better training for health-care professionals at the hospital, to ensure other children don’t experience the pain her daughter endured.

“It hurts everything inside of me that this was avoidable, and now my daughter is going to go through weeks of intense pain,” Gunther said.

With a report from CTV Edmonton’s Angela Jung