A Bath Settlement, West Coast Berbice mother yesterday said she had to deliver her premature baby on a bed in a ward at the New Amsterdam Hospital in January and she decried the treatment she experienced.
Her baby, who she later named Alayna, succumbed in the Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) one day after being delivered.
Bhanmattie Jagnanan, 29, said that she was admitted at the New Amsterdam Public Hospital on January 10. According to the woman, after she began experiencing pain and other symptoms she went to the health institution where she was told that she was diagnosed with dengue fever. As of result of this, medical practitioners there told her that “baby would come and she (baby) wouldn’t stand a chance”, since her baby would be only six months and two weeks.
The woman said, this was a thought which never crossed her mind when she visited the health facility but she trusted their medical advice at that time.
She was admitted and taken to the gynaecology ward instead of the labour room where she was handed a bed pan to place underneath her “and pass baby there.”
According to the woman, she explained to the nurse that she had two herniated discs and would not be able to do so, so instead she was given a mackintosh sheet to lie on. She recalled that for the entire night she experienced pain.
The next day, January, 12, they started administering drips to her which caused her to experience severe contractions. She then informed the nurses that she wanted to use the toilet. However, she was told that that should be expected.
A short while after this, the woman delivered the baby on the bed.
“I pull up the baby because she was crying and I didn’t want anything to happen to her because everything was under me. I call them because they were in front and I say nurse take my baby to the incubator and then she carry the baby”, the emotional woman relayed yesterday.
According to the woman, later that day two female doctors approached her and explained that “When baby born like this our country don’t have the incubators that overseas has and that they don’t even term these births as baby but as foetus.”
Jagnanan said her heart sank immediately as she had hopes that her baby would be able survive since “a relative had given birth (prematurely) at the Georgetown Public Hospital and her baby survived.”
She added, “And I didn’t have the money to go to a private facility where the incubators are more advance.”
Later that day, she visited her daughter in the NICU where she learned that “she was doing okay and her eyes open and her pulse progressed.” She recalled, that her daughter had on an EKG monitor but it had to be removed to be placed on another baby “and she was left without. I think they have about only two”, the mother said. She was discharged on January 12th but remained in the hospital since her child was still in the NICU. Later that day, she was called to the NICU but when she arrived the nurses questioned “who call the parent?” She said, she didn’t want to upset anyone so she told them that she would head back to the ward and that they could call her when they were finished but she was then told by a doctor that her baby was experiencing some breathing complications and they were going to try to resuscitate her.
An anxious Jagnanan went back to her ward where three minutes later she was informed that her baby had succumbed.
“I was crying and crying and then I went in and ask if I can hold my baby”. After getting into the NICU, she noticed a nurse “taking out the stuff from the incubator and then I saw the baby foot that tape from her ankle to her knee and it was more than one wrap and the nurse was trying to loose it and it was hard so I said ‘come let me help you’ and I tell she bring a scissors and I cut the thing and pull it off”.
She then questioned had her child survived how the tape would have been removed, “From the knee to the ankle was red, red, and they wrap she up in this type of tape.”
Jagnanan said she was then told that her baby’s body would have to be kept for a post-mortem examination but then the next day she was informed that the baby was too small for it to be done.
The body was handed over to the woman who later held a funeral and buried her child. “They didn’t register her or nothing. They didn’t have the weight or the length of the child nothing. Her card was empty and that is not right, we are parents and our feelings is not the same”, she said.
Jagnanan yesterday stated that she chose to speak out now after she read the story yesterday of the death of Vanessa Lewis and her child. Initially, she said she had no idea what to do “because them tell me is a premature baby but the way how things were done was not right”, she stated yesterday.
She said she grieves daily and no one from the health facility had ever reached out to check up on her after she left the institution on January 12 after her child had died.
The woman is encouraging other mothers to speak out also.
“It get more mothers like this. The night they said two baby had to go to the morgue. Sometimes we are afraid and don’t know what to do but we have to speak out”, she said.
She is also calling on the officials to investigate the hospital as well so as to ensure that the institution has advanced equipment to handle complicated cases. The woman also stressed, that some medical persons at the hospital are extremely professional but others “you can’t even ask a question and them always on them phone and chatting.”
Jagnanan, who is also the mother of a seven-year-old daughter, stressed that something needs to be done immediately as she does not wish to see other mothers experience what she went through, an experience she now has to live with for the rest of her life.
