[dropcap]T[/dropcap]o Holinda Arthur her second son was a special gift. A mother of three, her first son passed away three years ago. She continues to feel the almost unbearable pain of that loss. In a recent interview, Arthur (commonly known as Molly) told the STAR that she was eight months pregnant on July 27, 2015 when she started feeling intense abdominal pain. She blamed it on stress associated with a debacle between herself, her husband and Ministry of Education staffers. Accompanied by her teenaged daughter she quickly made her way to the emergency care unit at Victoria Hospital. She waited endlessly for attention.
Her husband later joined her and finally caught the attention of a nurse who advised Molly to go to the maternity ward. With no wheelchair available, Molly, in excruciating pain, made her way up the hill to the maternity ward, supported only by her husband.
“When I got there, I had to sit down, the pain was so terrible. I could not get a bed . . . no one attended to me until when the shift changed,” Molly advised.
About the woman who eventually ushered her inside to be assessed, Molly said: “They said she was a doctor but she never identified herself. Because of what she had on, I took her for a nurse.”
Later, Molly was informed that the woman was actually a junior doctor. Medical staff at the hospital advise that junior doctors are normally general practitioners or interns who, in cases where deliveries seem to be going smoothly, are allowed to oversee the process. Junior doctors report to the night’s designated consultant–gynecologist on call who typically takes over from lower-ranking doctors when the need arises.
In Molly’s case, the junior doctor was quite perturbed by the fact that in her condition, Molly had been left unattended. While being assessed, Molly says she was informed that the baby was well on his way. Her husband was directed to get some baby clothes and bring them to the hospital. “I asked her whether my water had already broken. I’ll never forget this part. When they put on the monitor, there was a heartbeat. She went into me with something in her hands to clip my water bag but I did not know what it was. I could feel her hands inside me,” Molly recalled.
Then she said, “Oh shit!” Words that Molly had never heard a doctor say while attending to a patient. “I asked her what happened but she did not answer.”
Unable to make sense of the somewhat desperate conversation between the doctor and her assistants, Molly laid back and waited for their next move. “She came back and said, ‘Baby may make it, or baby may not make it.’”
Minutes later, Molly said, the doctor made a phone call, soon after which the night’s consultant walked in and, without any checks, declared that Molly’s baby had died.
In shock, Molly and her husband asked to look at the baby before leaving the hospital. “They brought the child to me,” Molly said. “It was a boy; our first matrimony baby. He had blood coming down from his head but I felt like he had life in him. He gripped my husband and my daughter. My husband said this child has life inside of him. We were screaming for a nurse or a doctor. When my husband got someone they said: ‘No, that’s how they look when they’re dead.’”
“We requested an autopsy,” Molly went on. “We had it on Wednesday July 29, 2015, at Rambally’s. I saw my son, I saw the blood coming down his nose. It was so painful to watch.”
Her husband, who was present during a second interview with the STAR, added: “She [Molly] went outside, but I stayed in the room to watch.” The doctor who conducted the autopsy reported that the baby’s organs were intact and labelled the death “foetus demise.”
Molly said: “My husband kept asking how can a healthy baby just die? We told the doctor we would not bury our child until we knew what exactly killed him. We insisted on a second autopsy.”
In 2016, “after much hassle”, the couple caught the attention of the then health minister, Alvina Reynolds, who informed that another autopsy could be arranged. But on his return to the hospital, Molly’s husband learned their baby’s body had been “buried”.
Molly: “I rushed to the hospital to meet him and that’s when they told us to go to Rambally’s. We wanted to get documents referencing the child’s burial. But none were available from Rambally’s. “We asked to speak to the bossman and that’s when the owner of the parlour came out and said they had no babies, they sent back all the bodies. “I realized, when I did my own investigation, that at that time the freezer in the VH mortuary was not working. So they were sending all the bodies to Rambally’s funeral parlour.” The couple returned to the hospital but found no answers.
The next day Molly and Ben decided to revisit Rambally’s where they were informed that their child’s body had been recovered the night before. Molly recalled: “We followed them to a freezer. They put some plywood on the floor and threw a plastic bag on it. When it was open we saw just a block of ice. We could not tell whether the body in it was a baby’s or a dog’s.”
Eventually, with the aid of Dr Stephen King, the Arthurs sent some samples to a lab in Jamaica. The inconclusive results came back on October 11, 2016: the presented body had already been embalmed. Another test involving a sample of bone marrow would need to be conducted. Molly says she grew weary. Unsure whether the iced body was indeed her baby, and concerned about liabilty, she reached out to as many people as she could, including the prime minister, whom she met in December 2016. Attempts to reach him thereafter were futile.
Molly says that in June of last year, however, the Parliamentary Commissioner, Rosemarie Husbands-Mathurin, wrote a letter to health minister Mary Isaac, and Molly received word that the government would assume liability for the dead body in question. Since then, Molly says, it has been a series of postponements and unanswered questions.
A meeting involving several health personnel, including from Victoria Hospital, was convened for January 11, 2018. “They told us tests would have to be conducted overseas.” Since then, nothing. Still Molly persists. “I told them at the Ministry of Health I would give them up until June 30, but still nothing.” Now, Molly says she plans to take the matter to court. “I gave these people enough time. If I cannot get justice for my baby, I will take it higher. I have suffered too much. I am tired of it, fed up, frustrated.”
As I write Molly has started the process that she hopes will result in justice for her deceased baby and his family!
