It would not be wrong to assume that a pregnant woman who is due goes to a maternity hoping for nothing but the best.
Ruth Mwenja and Alice Kasuva, two mothers who visited maternity wards, in different places, four years apart were also hoping for the best.
Sadly, their tales are of sorrow. Before we read about Ruth and Alice, we should jog your memory a little.
Barely two years ago, there was a numbing video of an unnamed woman — captured by a cellphone camera by another expectant woman — being scolded by nurses at Bungoma District Hospital, for delivering on the floor of the facility’s maternity section.
In the video, the woman is seen writhing on the floor. The cry of her baby, already born, shrill and clear. Three burly looking nurses walk nonchalantly to her and instead of moving with speed to care for the newborn and the mother, they scold her.
They ask why she is ‘behaving badly’. They slap her around and order her to walk to a ward.
To date, questions linger about what exactly transpired. Why was the woman on the floor? Wasn’t space available in the delivery room or the maternity ward? And if space was available why didn’t the nurses ascertain the stage of her labour and make room for her? Why were the nurses infuriated by her giving birth on the floor when they never provided her with a safer alternative?
The then Cabinet Secretary for health, James Macharia, ordered for a probe into the barbarity displayed by the very people entrusted with the health of mothers during delivery.
In a statement, Macharia called for “re-orientation of nurses on proper care giving to ensure that such malpractices are stamped out.”
Nothing is yet to come from the probe ordered by the CS. Nearly four years have passed and nurses, it seems, are still reading from the same script.
This emerged a few days ago when one social media user provoked an avalanche of ‘abuse’ from nurses on one platform. The provocative statement, calling nurses ‘b**ches’, drew the ire of other social media users believed to be nurses.
In their retaliation, the nurses described in detail how they can dispense torture and make patients — like the provocateur — pay for their disrespect of the profession.
Rodabellah Arimba posted on her timeline: ‘If you ever insult a nurse and it happens you get yourself in hospital bed and in [sic] a life support machine ... that nurse will unplug it just to charge her phone.’
Nanjala Winny, another nurse, unleashed a chilling account of how she would kill the ‘bothersome’ patient, writing: ‘Huyu nikimpata nampea aminophylline faster faster aende akiendaga, never to get the life to call people whores.’ ‘If I get this patient I will quickly administer aminophylline for her to die quickly so that she never lives to call people whores.’
There were plenty other bloodcurdling utterances by the nurses.
Ruth Mwenja is taking the nurses at their word when they describe the kind of torture they can unleash on patients. “I know firsthand because I have been mistreated in a hospital,” she says.
On August 30, 2011, Ruth was admitted (against her will) into a hospital in Nairobi.
She describes how she was told her baby was on his way even though she was not in labour and had no contractions either.
“I was then injected with medicine to induce labour. Actual labour pain started afterwards,” she says.
Thirty hours later, she had not given birth and was in “so much pain”. She says: “The doctor painfully cut me to make way for the baby and asked me to push. I tried but I was too exhausted to push.”
By that time, Ruth recalls, her doctor and the nurses in the ward were pretty worked up, and were asking her to stop causing trouble and cooperate.
“It was my first time giving birth. I had been ambushed, against my will, to go through with this labour. I was induced to go through it. I was in pain and kept pressing the button at my bedside every time the pain got intense,” she says.
After pressing the bell a few times, the nurses moved her bed far from the knob so that she could no longer press it.
“There are times I wanted to support myself by holding a nurse’s hand and they would slap my hand away and say I was a troublemaker,” Ruth says.
To get her baby out, her doctor asked a male nurse to press at Ruth’s bump with his elbow. The baby, a boy, emerged with a crushed, oblong head.
Ruth’s baby survived but never experienced the normal growth expected of a newborn. The boy succumbed to his injuries three years later, in April 2016.
The doctor and the nurses accused Ruth of ‘doing this’ to her son. None of them has ever apologised.
In Alice Kasuva’s case, she had rushed to a hospital in Nairobi after her amniotic fluid started leaking.
“I was rushed into surgery for an emergency caesarean section,” she says. However, when she woke up from anesthesia, she didn’t have her baby by her side.
“The nurses told me that they would bring my baby later. They said he had complications and was being observed in a babies’ room,” Alice recalls.
More than 24 hours passed without Alice setting her eyes on the baby she had just given birth to.
“I found it fishy, especially when the nurses got agitated every time I asked for my baby. They would rebuff my questions with foul-mouthed answers,” she says.
It is only after Alice phoned her husband and confided in him that the hospital provided the couple with the body of a boy who was missing some body parts.”
“I knew that wasn’t my baby but the hospital staff said I was in denial; that I was imagining things,” she says.
Alice didn’t want to leave the hospital until she had a better understanding of what happened to her baby. But since she had ‘overstayed’ in the hospital, she was asked to leave, to create space for a new patient. She had to get her own food as well.
“It was quite inhuman. Considering I had not even had the chance to know what actually happened to my son,” she says. Left with no option, and too poor to wield any form of power, Alice was forced to go home — without a baby.
“They wanted me to take the dead child. My gut feeling told me that was not my son. I didn’t take it and left without a baby,” she says.
Such stories, speak of the inhumane treatment some health care givers subject their patients to.
But does it happen because the patient is at fault or do patients expect too much from the caregivers, who, are just human?