Near Miss

Shayd

Tuesday, 1 April 2008

My heart felt empathy goes out to Charley and her family. We had the same type of experience with the same midwife but fortunately at Waikato Hospital.

I was present at the birth of my grandson 1 year ago and he was born not breathing, but it was only a few minutes before he was administered oxygen and took about 5 minutes for him to breath on his own. It was traumatic at the time to say the least.

The labour progressed normally but took a turn for the worse when the mother was told she could start pushing (without an internal examination to check if she was ready) and after 1 – 1 ½ hrs she was exhausted and said she couldn’t do it, requesting to go through to Waikato Hospital.

On arrival at Waikato they discovered she was only 6cm dialated (of course she wasn’t going to be able to deliver the baby) and the baby had turned and had to completely rotate again.

It was pretty down hill from there on, complications with everything and anything, poor things. After several hours the babys heart rate was down and they were concerned about oxygen levels and did tests that didn’t work.

To cut a long story short, they turned up the drip to bring on her contractions and turned off the epidural and the mum knew instinctively something was wrong and she had to knuckle down and get him out. 40 minutes later he was born with his cord around his neck, grey, limp, not breathing.

The midwife was not her primary carer and was filling in for her colleagues weekend off (same two midwives). She constantly referred to only having ‘X’ amount of hours to go and she will have paid back all the hours she owed her colleague. The whole experience was less than satisfactory.

My son and his partner consider themselves so fortunate to have a healthy baby boy after seeing 20/20. The mum was shocked to see who the midwife was when she saw 20/20 and texted me to phone her. She felt so angry that the midwife could still be practicing, allowing them to be subjected to such similar circumstances.

I just wanted to let you know that this was obviously not a one off for that midwife and goodness knows how many other cases there might be. Hopefully people will come forward and justice will prevail.

My thoughts are with Jenn, Charley and family.

Take care, all the best…

Sharon