A man whose 41-year-old wife died on Wednesday last at the Georgetown Public Hospital (GPH) is blaming officials there for performing two operations on her without his consent and says he will not let the matter rest until he gets justice.
Carol Bollers, a resident of Festival City, North Ruimveldt and a mother of five, was taken to the hospital last week Monday morning after she was experiencing terrible back pain, her husband Robert Greaves called Bobby said.
A GPH press release had stated that the woman was less than five months pregnant and was admitted to the hospital with pregnancy complications. “She visited the Accident & Emergency Unit complaining of abdominal pains and ruptured membranes and was treated for spontaneous rupture of membranes but subsequently died,” the release stated.
Speaking to the Stabroek News on Sunday, a distraught Greaves angrily expressed his dissatisfaction with the entire matter. The man noted that what happened to his wife was not the first ever and was totally annoyed that the hospital is continuously taking innocent lives by doing things without families’ will and knowledge.
Greaves who is a businessman, musician/singer related to this newspaper that he had left home around minutes to 7 last Monday morning to conduct business and when he returned later in the day, his wife was lying on the floor with a sheet covering her entire body. He said she told him she was cold and felt better when she’s in the sun; she was lying where the sun was entering the room.
Greaves said he then suggested to his wife that she may have contracted malaria, since the symptoms she said she was experiencing mirrored those of the mosquito-borne disease. He said he left to collect his cellular phone which was being repaired, after informing her that he would not be long. On returning, Greaves said, he saw his wife dressed and she asked to be taken to the hospital. She told me, “Call a taxi and take me to the hospital fast,” the grieving man said, which he did.
When they got to the GPH, Greaves said, a man who knew his wife saw her and advised her not to walk because of the state she was in. He then went and got a wheelchair and took her in, Greaves said, and he then joined her in the doctor’s office. “When she go in and explain to the doctor what happen to her, right away they put she on a bed naked as she was born and start put on a set of stuff on she like oxygen, clamps on all she fingers and also attach drips [saline],” the man explained. “She complain to me that she wasn’t comfortable and she wanted to move in her own position and I assisted and put her how she wanted during which we were communicating and she told me she got $2,000 in the bag and I must take it out and so.” He said he later told her that he would go home and take care of their two youngest children.
With tears in his eyes, Greaves said that after he left the hospital that afternoon he never saw his wife alive again. When he returned the next day (Tuesday), he was informed that he could not see her because she was in the operating theatre. He said he was told that “the doctors were working on her so I must come back later,” the weeping husband related. He was he was helpless and had no choice but to return later in the day.
When he returned, a doctor was waiting on him to explain what had happened. “Lady, I could have kill that doctor when he told me they had to perform an emergency surgery on her to save her life,” Greaves said, adding that he replied that no one gave them the permission to operate on Bollers.
He said after holding out that he wanted to see his wife he eventually got to but it was the worst he had seen her in the entire 10 years they had lived together. “I feel like just losing faith and kill them when I walked into that room and saw my wife lying there lifelessly with oxygen attached to her,” he said. He added, “I told them this woman dead from the time is see her and they had the mind to tell me, ‘talk to she, she will hear you.’ But she couldn’t, she lay there lifelessly. Her hands were cold; she appeared puff and then they adding to all they had told me by saying they had to cripple her to stop the bleeding.”
Greaves said later on the same day he returned to the hospital with his two youngest children and they all prayed for Bollers and spoke to her but got no responses.
He said when he took his wife to the hospital she was a strong woman and she wasn’t even bleeding as the officials are claiming. He insisted that Bollers had not performed any abortion at any time before she was rushed to the hospital since if she had did he would have known about it because they shared a very close relationship.
He said that sometime back his wife did mention to him that she was not feeling too well but was instead feeling like she was pregnant and he encouraged her to join a clinic as soon as possible but she never did, instead she fell sick and had to be taken to the hospital, the place where she took her last breath.
On the day she died, Greaves said, he received a call around 5 am from someone at the hospital, whom he described as very rude, informing him to go to the hospital immediately, which he couldn’t do because it was raining heavily. “The person tell me if you want to see your wife come now because she going over to the mortuary and if you don’t come now you will have to visit her there,” he said, as tears flowed from his eyes.
The man said he went later in the day to the hospital where his worst fear was then confirmed.
He added though that he will be taking all the possible steps to seek justice for his wife even if he has to sell all of his assets.
“They operate on her twice; then they telling me they had to because they wanted to stop the bleeding and after they did once they had to go back in her to see if anything was left,” Greaves lamented, adding that when he questioned why they were telling him all of this only then, he got no answer. “If they did ask me before I would have never give my consent either and they wouldn’t have killed her,” an angry Greaves said. He also added that he feels guilty about his wife’s death because she always used to tell him that if she fell ill never to take her to the GPH because so many people had died reportedly as a result of that hospital’s negligence. However, at the time, the man said, he had no other option.
Adding to his grief, he said, was the fact that he has not been able to know what caused Bollers’s death. A post-mortem examination was performed on Wednesday, but when relatives asked for a copy of the woman’s death certificate they were told they could not get one until after two weeks since other tests have to be done.
Greaves said that despite all of his pain and anger he still has to live and take care of his two young children and has to play the roles of both mother and father. At the same time, he is determined not to let the matter rest until he receives justice. He had planned to visit Minister of Public Health Dr George Norton yesterday to discuss not only his wife’s case but others who had suffered similar fates.
