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Sunday, February 16, 2025

Hospital Horrors: More expectant mothers share stories of loss

by

Renuka Singh
1849 days ago
20200124

Two more women have come for­ward with tales of hor­ror at the na­tion’s hos­pi­tals.

One of the women shared her ex­pe­ri­ence at the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal from back in Oc­to­ber while an­oth­er de­tailed the night­mare of learn­ing that she was preg­nant two days be­fore she lost her ba­by at the Scar­bor­ough Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal in To­ba­go.

Guardian Me­dia sat with 27-year-old Shenelle Wal­lace yes­ter­day and she claimed that three days af­ter her ba­by was pro­nounced dead, with no heart­beat, blood flow or brain ac­tiv­i­ty, no doc­tors came to re­move the ba­by.

“ I had a child in­side me, to my know­ing maybe de­cay­ing and they didn’t have no sense of ur­gency,” Wal­lace said.

“Af­ter be­ing told that the ba­by had no heart­beat, no blood flow and no brain ac­tiv­i­ty, I want­ed to get it out,” she said.

Wal­lace said that even af­ter wait­ing for days in a chair as no beds were avail­able when she even­tu­al­ly did get a bed, she was made to give birth to her still­born daugh­ter on the ward, in full view of oth­er pa­tients and vis­i­tors.

“My ques­tion was, okay, if I’m ready to give birth are you all tak­ing me over to de­liv­ery. One of the nurs­es said no, you could have it right here,” Wal­lace said.

“This is a ward with a lot of beds, dur­ing vis­it­ing hours. Peo­ple al­ready com­ing in. I said right here? They said yes, we’d just pull the cur­tain,” she said.

Wal­lace said while the pri­va­cy cur­tain was pulled around her left side, the en­tire right side was ex­posed to the oth­er women in the ward as well as their male vis­i­tors.

“The pa­tient is next to me, she is watch­ing as I am giv­ing birth and her cur­tain is not pulled and there are guys, there are men walk­ing up and down, there is pa­tients, peo­ple who came to see their fam­i­ly. So I am ba­si­cal­ly ex­posed,” she said.

She said the nurs­es spread blue pa­per on the bed and when the ba­by was out, told her she could not touch it.

“When I gave birth, they just took the ba­by and kind of wrapped her up in a piece of pa­per like she was trash,” she said.

Wal­lace has been promised grief coun­selling but was told she had to seek it her­self and was giv­en a re­fer­ral.

“I asked them about the grief coun­selling and they just gave me a pa­per, I still have it. They said I had to ap­ply for it my­self,” she said.

Wal­lace though is a house­wife with two young daugh­ters 5 and 2 and said it takes all her time and en­er­gy to bring her­self to look af­ter them.

“Af­ter that hap­pened, I slept on the floor, I didn’t want to be on the bed with my hus­band or my chil­dren. I felt like there was sup­posed to be one more. I didn’t want to see them,” she said.

“It was re­al­ly hard, my hus­band he couldn’t re­al­ly grieve be­cause he had to be strong for me be­cause he knew that I was a mess,” she said.

“You al­ways hear the hor­ror sto­ries and you think that when you go in­to the hos­pi­tal, this would nev­er hap­pen to me and be­ing a preg­nant woman I thought, you know, they would treat you with such re­spect and hold you to high­er re­gard be­cause you are bring­ing life, but they didn’t care, they didn’t care one bit,” she said.

Wal­lace said com­ing out of her pain, she want­ed to share her sto­ry to high­light what was hap­pen­ing at the pub­lic hos­pi­tals.

“We have to speak out to get things to change,” she said.

An­oth­er woman, Stephanie Michelle Mena learned of her own preg­nan­cy just two days be­fore she lost her ba­by.

Mena told Guardian Me­dia that she vis­it­ed the Scar­bor­ough Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal last Fri­day with se­vere back pains and learned that she was preg­nant. She was al­so told that nei­ther she nor the ba­by was in dan­ger and she was just suf­fer­ing from a blad­der in­fec­tion.

Mena said she was checked by a gy­nae­col­o­gist who “pressed re­al­ly hard on my stom­ach”. when she was first ad­mit­ted to the hos­pi­tal on Fri­day night. She said there was lit­tle at­ten­tion paid to her or her pain un­til one doc­tor of­fered her mor­phine.

“I re­fused be­cause even though he said it was safe, I was scared that it could harm the ba­by. I would rather be in pain than hurt my child,” she said.

Mena said she has left on her own again, and even though she was pre­scribed an­tibi­otics, none was ad­min­is­tered to her.

She said that the one time nurs­es came to check on her was to ask her to give up her bed for a “more crit­i­cal case”.

“I told them that I was put on bed rest be­cause I was had flu­ids leak­ing and they didn’t lis­ten. I was forced from my bed and I had to sit on a chair for hours,” she said.

The 19-year old first-time mom said that by Sun­day morn­ing around 4.40 am. she re­alised that she was bleed­ing and went to the bath­room.

“I felt a lot of pres­sure and then my ba­by came out. I saw his head, he was still at­tached to me,” she said.

“I used tis­sue to hold him and he had ten fin­gers and ten toes. He was per­fect­ly formed al­ready,” she said.

Mena said she screamed for the nurse but none came.

“One of the pa­tients in the room went to get the nurse and she came and told me to clean up and hugged me and she brought this blue sheet of pa­per and told me to leave the ba­by in the sheet on the seat they had in the bath­room,” she said.

Mena said she called her par­ents and her fi­nance to be with her at the hos­pi­tal.

“My son re­mained there on that seat, wrapped in the pa­per un­til around 8 am,” she said.

Mena said her par­ents warned her about com­ing for­ward with her sto­ry out of fear of vic­tim­i­sa­tion at the same hos­pi­tal.

“But I don’t care. My sad­ness has turned to anger and I have so many ques­tions. What if they treat­ed me with the an­tibi­otics when they were sup­posed to? what if the first doc­tor didn’t press so hard on my stom­ach? what if I wasn’t tak­en off the bed and giv­en a chair?” Mena asked.

*Guardian Me­dia al­lowed these women to share their sto­ries freely and un­in­hib­it­ed.

The news­pa­per in­tends to get re­spons­es from var­i­ous health of­fi­cials about these spe­cif­ic cas­es.


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