Expectant mother who died was poorly treated by nurses – widower

The husband of Luan Rodney who died early Tuesday morning in childbirth said that he learnt yesterday that his wife was in terrible pain and that it was only after she started bleeding that the nurses swung into action.

A still distraught Nigel Rodney said that after being unable to meet with the doctors who were tending to his wife Luan when she died, he decided to do some investigations on his own. He said that when Luan was admitted they befriended two young women who were also patients.

Luan Rodney
Luan Rodney

According to Rodney, one of them spotted him yesterday and signalled to him. The man said that the young woman related to him that after the tablet was inserted on Monday to induce labour, his wife was in a lot of pain and was not being looked at by the nurse on duty.

He said that as his wife lay groaning, the young woman said she went to the nurse to alert her to this but was chased back to her bed. Rodney told Stabroek News that it was shortly after this that the young woman noticed blood and alerted the nurse. “It was then that everybody start getting busy. By then I feel she uterus din already burst”, he said, adding that this bit of information helped him to understand a little bit more about what might have happened.

The man said that prior to speaking to the young woman he saw his wife’s remains before an autopsy was done. He said that he was not given any information on the cause of death but a Cuban doctor told him that samples were taken from the body which would be tested to determine if she had any other problems prior to her death.

He also stated that after he was unable to see the doctors for a second time on Tuesday on the circumstances surrounding his wife’s death, a senior nurse was to have made arrangements for this to happen the following day (yesterday). He said that the nurse apparently forgot and as such another attempt was being made to facilitate such a meeting.

Rodney stated that based on what a medical professional told him, because of the damage to the uterus, his wife would have had a slim chance of survival. He questioned why “they couldn’t try and save the baby”.

When this newspaper first saw him yesterday, the now single-parent father of a four-year-old girl was in a daze and kept shaking his head as he stared at photographs of them together. He said that he just cannot believe he had no wife and no baby.

Rodney who is a brush cutter/landscaper/ gardener said that he is so devastated that he cannot even go to work. He said that shortly before his wife was admitted he stopped some painting work that was being done at the house. “I stop the painting because I didn’t want the baby to have to come and deh smelling paint”, he said, adding that he was looking forward to washing baby clothes and napkins and caring for his wife.

Meanwhile, he said that his four-year-old daughter keeps asking for her mother. She is oblivious to what has happened and is her usual bubbly self. He plans to visit the hospital again with the hope of meeting the doctors.

Luan and her newborn will be buried on Monday.

Rodney had recounted to this newspaper that they always knew that their baby would have been born long after the May 22 due date. He said when the baby did not come they were not surprised. The woman attended clinic and the only issue she had was swollen feet.

He said that they visited the Georgetown Hospital on Saturday where the nurses questioned her about various things. They returned to the hospital on Monday sometime after 8 am but Luan was never admitted until 3 pm that day.

Based on what he said, sometime after 10 pm a tablet was inserted to induce labour. Around 2 am a cousin informed him that the contractions were coming four minutes apart. At that point he was certain that when he visited the hospital that morning he would be seeing his baby.

When he arrived at the hospital just after 6 am on Tuesday with her breakfast he could not find his wife and was told that she was in the operating theatre. He said that this did not surprise him because he knew from the size of her belly that the baby was big.

He added that he later left after he could not get the breakfast to her. Later, while on his way home from dropping their daughter to school a doctor called and asked him to go to the hospital. The man had told this newspaper that when he arrived at the hospital the doctor told him that his wife had died. The explanation was that the uterus had burst because the baby was too big.

The hospital has since said that an internal probe into this latest maternal death has been launched.