How The Carelessness of Medical Personnel Led To The Death Of Justin’s Baby.

By Timothy Ijala

Pregnancy is a time filled both with joy and anticipation but also anxiety for many African women, especially if it is the first child on the way.
But many things can and do go wrong like having complications during the pregnancy or worse still a miscarriage. Some women have had the misfortune to suffer both. Justin is a case in point (name has been changed at the request of the person in the story).
After suffering a miscarriage during her first pregnancy, she was really looking forward to having a child. So when she discovered she was pregnant again she was joyful. The good news is that for the nine months she was pregnant there were no complications and so looked forward to having their first child. Little did she know that at the time of delivery, things would go wrong, very wrong.
To this day she blames the nurses who were tending to her during those last hours. “They ignored me most of the time” she says, “and it was only when I was in a real crisis that they rushed to help me.” By then, it was too late for Justin’s baby was a stillborn.
It all started when, a doctor recommended a scan to see if the baby was past the delivery date. The scan showed that indeed she was past the delivery date by over 9 days.
A second doctor, a friend of her husband, immediately recommended that she be injected with a drug that would induce labour which he administered.
Then he told her to rest in the ward and as soon as she went into labour she was to go and see the doctor in charge.
Hardly had she reached the room which was around 10.00 a.m that she started having severe labour pains.
When she went and informed the nurses on duty, they told her she was not yet at the critical stage, she needed to wait.
She did as they recommended but found the pain unbearable so again she told the nurses who were in the ward chatting away and listening to a radio. Instead of attending to her they just ignored her saying that she was complaining for nothing.

Justin painfully went back to the bed but on seeing one nurse from a different section of the hospital whom she happened to know passing by, she called to her and she came over.
Justin took the nurse’s hand and told her that she was not letting go until either she was dead or the baby was born.
By then her waters had broken and although she had told the nurses on duty they had still continued to ignore her.
Unfortunately in her effort to hold on until it was the right time to deliver with assistance from the nurses, she had squeezed the baby’s head which had by this time started to come out and the baby had died.
The nurse whom she was holding on to noticed that Justin was also beginning to get tired and lose consciousness so she called the nurses who now came quickly and this time begun to attend to her.
They put her on oxygen and helped her deliver the baby who was by now dead. It was now past midnight, 12 hours after she had first started having the induced labour pains.
Being a government run hospital, resources were scarce but that could not explain the attitude of the hospital staff. Her story is repeated many times a day in many different parts of Africa for different mothers, with different backgrounds but the same outcome, loss of a child.