A 28-year-old teacher of No. 64 Village, Corentyne died at the Skeldon Hospital sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning after giving birth to her third child.
The woman, Esther Dwarka-Bowlin, acting Headmistress of the Princetown Nursery School in Corriverton was taken to the hospital around 8:30 pm on Friday after she started experiencing labour pain.
Relatives suspected that she died long before the 6 am visit on Saturday because she had already “turned blue,” but said the hospital had not informed them.
They are calling for the matter to be thoroughly investigated and “hope that this would not be another cover up … Why they treated her like that? The nurses are there to help people.”
They said patients later told them that Esther “really punished and had to deliver the baby all alone.” They learnt too that the nurses were apparently sleeping because although the woman was screaming in pain, no one came to her assistance.
Reports are that when Esther told the nurses earlier that she was ready to deliver they told her to “go and sleep; you too disgusting.”
They are “praying to God and we hope to get justice. She died and left three children – a four-year-old boy and girl, almost two-years-old along with the baby. We are hurt but the kids would suffer most of all.”
Her husband Carlos, a spray painter told Stabroek News that he got a phone call from the hospital after 6 am on Saturday that the doctor wanted to see him.
At the time he was preparing porridge for one of his children and did not have the slightest idea that his wife had died.
Carlos said when he got there the doctor was leaving and his mother who was there earlier tried to stop the doctor but he told her to “let him go inside.”
The nurses started to tell him that his wife “delivered a baby boy and she was hollering and so…”
He said he got impatient and told them to get to the point and asked “what happened to my wife; she died? And when they said yes I ran out of the hospital and I started hollering `where ah gon get another wife like this from’”.
He said he dropped down on the road and then took a taxi and headed straight home. “I keep telling myself I was dreaming. We were living very nice.”
The distressed Carlos also said, “We made a lot of commitments for her to attend the University [of Guyana.] It is hard to know that I have three children to look after and their mother wouldn’t be around. I wasn’t prepared for this; this is more than a shock…”
Her eldest sister-in-law, Allison Bowlin of Springlands told Stabroek News that when she left the hospital to go home around 10 pm the woman was crying out in severe pain.
Ordered her out
Although she could not bear to see Esther in so much pain and was sad to leave she had no other choice because the nurse had ordered her out of the building.
Before that she gave Esther some tea and she then “held on to me and cried and begged me to stay.”
According to Allison, “She told me she would die and I said ‘no you won’t die’ and I asked her if she don’t know God and we held each other and prayed.”
Her sister-in-law then told her that her back was hurting and asked her to rub it. In the process of doing that the nurse told her “you would have to come out of here because I just put out a man.”
She said, “I understand that it is the policy of the hospital that relatives cannot remain there after certain hours…”
“But,” the deeply emotional Allison lamented while in tears, “at that the same time when patients need special attention the nurses wouldn’t give them – they [nurses] didn’t go and rub her back although it was hurting her a lot.”
The following morning when Esther’s mother-in-law showed up for the 6 am visit the nurses told her she could not see her daughter-in-law because she was “haemorrhaging.” They also told her that she gave birth to a baby boy.
Allison had also received a call from the hospital that she should go there and she suspected that something was amiss.
She saw her mother and a cousin standing on the road in front of the hospital and they said that they were waiting for an ambulance to take Esther to the New Amsterdam Hospital.
Allison told this newspaper that she recalled hearing an ambulance pass around 5 am that day and thought that it was her sister-in-law being transferred.
She felt that if Esther were still alive at that time and was having complications she too would have been in the ambulance.
They were still waiting in front of the hospital when her brother ran out screaming that his wife had died.
She said they all started crying and her mother immediately collapsed and later her father too, after hearing the news. They both had to be hospitalized.
Allison said her sister-in-law never suffered any complications during her pregnancy except that on one occasion in the latter stages her blood pressure was a bit high.
She assumed that it could be from the fatigue of attending the University of Guyana after teaching and said when she was admitted to the hospital her pressure was normal.
The family was happy that on Saturday, Dr. Aarti Sharma visited the home and sympathized with them on behalf of the regional authority. She assured them that “something like this would not re-occur.”
Esther’s parents have already arrived in the country from the United States and they too are taking the news very hard.
This case is the third in Berbice in around a month. Twenty-six-year-old Rebekha Chinamootoo of No. 36 Village, Corentyne died in September after giving birth to a healthy baby boy by c-section at the New Amsterdam Hospital.
A pregnant teenager, Nadira Sammy of No. 69 Village who was diagnosed with high blood pressure lost her life at the NA Hospital two days before.
Rebekha’s mother Minett Chinamootoo of No. 35 Village had told this newspaper that she informed the nurses that Rebekha would have to deliver her baby via c-section since her first child, a five-year-old girl, was also delivered in that manner.
She had said that they kept Rebekha in the labour room and “she just waiting there and was getting plenty pain but she was not getting the passage to get the baby.
“Dey punish me daughter… Before dey tek she in the theatre she hold onto me and was crying really bad.” After the delivery the nurses showed them the baby and when they were asked to leave the hospital shortly after, Rebekha appeared to be unconscious.
Around midnight her family received a phone call from the hospital that she was transferred to the Georgetown Public Hospital where she was later pronounced dead.
The woman who insisted that the hospital staff delayed performing the c-section said the results of a post-mortem examination confirmed that she bled to death.
In the case of Nadira, her mother, Serojanie Sammy, 38, had told this newspaper that her daughter was admitted to the maternity ward on September 16 and was diagnosed with high blood pressure.
She said her daughter who was residing with her husband at Number 69 Village after getting married last December, had visited the Skeldon Hospital clinic earlier that day where the first diagnosis was made.
Sammy said she left the hospital later that evening after promising her daughter that she would return the following morning with breakfast.
When she got there after 6 am Nadira was not in the ward but a pair of slippers belonging to her was in the middle of the room and she immediately became concerned.
The nurse-in-charge told her that Nadira began experiencing pain around 8:30 pm and she developed a “blowing” and could not breathe properly.
She also related that they were “looking after she fuh move she to Georgetown Hospital” but that she died during the process.