Aaron Nicodemus
It was 4am on a Saturday morning, and Matsietsi Mohaka was alone behind a thin hospital curtain. Five months pregnant with complications related to diabetes, she had come to Chris Hani Baragwanath hospital 11 hours earlier, expecting someone to help her. Her body was racked with pain for most of the night, but her screams had largely gone unanswered.
Fifteen minutes later, the 38-year-old woman gave birth to a baby boy, alone. “I was screaming for help, screaming that the baby comes, but no one helped,” she says. “He fell on my thigh, I felt him kicking on my thigh. After a second, there was that quietness to show he was dead.”
She says nurses came five minutes later, cutting the umbilical cord and urging her to push out the placenta. They cleaned up the blood, but offered no consolation, she says, other than to say, “What did you expect from a five-month-old child? He’s dead.”
Mohaka’s nightmare at Baragwanath began when she and her 17-year-old daughter hired a taxi to take them to the hospital. After Mohaka was admitted, staff told her daughter to leave.
Mohaka says she sat on a bed in the maternity ward hallway for an hour before a doctor examined her. The doctor told her the baby was still breathing, that the womb was still closed, and that she was diabetic. The doctor took blood to run tests, and told her he would be back in four hours to check on her again. The doctor referred her to the ward for diabetics.
The nurses instead took her to a different ward, Mohaka says, where they ignored the doctor’s order to give her some pain medicine. Instead of trying to make her feel comfortable, they yelled at her, saying that her cries of pain were bothering the other patients. The nurses told Mohaka that mothers half her age handled the pain of childbirth much better than she did.
At 1am, Mohaka says, she was given a pill for the pain. The nurses once again chastised her for making too much noise.
Several hours later, a nurse returned to check on her. The nurse discovered something of concern, but did not tell Mohaka what was wrong. The nurse struggled to put an intravenous drip into Mohaka’s arm.
Mohaka says the nurse told her that as this was not her first child, “you should know what to do”. Then, she says, the nurse said something like, “It’s over,” and closed the curtain.
“I was so scared and terrified, I thought it was over for me,” Mohaka said.
At 6am, after having seen her baby die, Mohaka was woken and told the beds had to be cleaned. At 10am, a doctor examined her, but was told by the nurses that she had given birth the previous night, not six hours earlier. She was exhausted and still bleeding.
Despite her condition, she was released from the hospital at 11am, less than 24 hours after she’d been admitted. She was alone, still frightened, but now without the baby boy she’d carried in her womb. The entire experience has left her humiliated, frustrated, empty – and angry.
“I don’t think anyone should have to go through that. It was terrifying. It was a nightmare,” said Mohaka from her home in Soweto. “The face of that nurse pulling the curtain comes time and time again. The kicking of the child. The silence that followed when he died. It’s killing me.”
The hospital kept the body of her baby boy, who had weighed in at a tiny 410g. “They said it was underweight and that the hospital would take care of it,” she says. She was told that it is hospital policy that any baby that dies weighing under 800g is buried by the hospital. “I couldn’t even bury my son,” she said.
After media inquiries into the incident, Chris Hani Baragwanath has begun a full investigation into the case. Hospital representative Hester Vorster said that the maternity, obstetrics and gynaecology departments are each conducting investigations into Mohaka’s allegations. She would not speculate how long the investigation would take to reach a conclusion.
Mohaka had been looking forward to having this child, as she knows the time will come soon when she cannot physically have any more children. She has a 17-year-old daughter, but her nine-year-old son, Lefa, died last February in a car accident. Another son died soon after he was born. Mohaka is no stranger to tragedy.
“I wanted that child so desperately. I don’t have that luck,” she says. Her family had been very happy when they found she was pregnant with a boy, because it would help ease the pain of losing two other sons.
Mohaka had even chosen a name for her unborn son that she lost at Chris Hani Baragwanath. “I was going to call him Tshediso,” she said. “In Sesotho, that means `consolation’.”