As I’m sure you can imagine there was much discussion on the ICAN list of the two moms who died within days of each other after their cesareans at Underwood, a New Jersey hospital.

I’m sharing the following post, with permission.

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I am a registered nurse, and have no intention of ever working within a hospital setting again. It really is all about the business and not about the patient. The human life we are caring for. In NJ, where I reside, there is a nursing shortage. In addition to a nursing shortage, there are very poor unregulated nurse patient ratios, making quality care hard to provide when the nurse is spread thin. I don’t know what the mother baby ratio was at Underwood, but I do believe that with the appropriate monitoring, these cases if truly resulting in hemorrhage and a clot perhaps may have been prevented. But there are a lot of questions that need to be asked.

At what point in their stay did the episodes occur?

Where was the clot? Was it a pulmonary embolism? Clot went to the lungs. A myocardial infarction? Clot went to the heart. A stroke? Clot went to the brain. Was her PT/PTT time measured before or after the surgery? Bleeding time. What were her platelets? Clotting component. These measure clotting predictability. Was she wearing compression boots on her legs and if so, for how long. This is to prevent clot formation, which is very often where clots form s/p surgeries due to venous stasis, and platelet formation at the incision site. How often was the nursing staff in the room? How often were her vitals measured? Did she complain of any DVT pain? Leg pain, heat, swelling of the leg at the location of the clot? There is clot busting medication available IV for emergency situations. But if no one was in her room for hours upon hours, no one would have seen the signs. I know from my 4 c/s that nurses don’t frequent the room as often as they should
and they don’t respond quickly to your calls on the call bell.

Hemorrhage. Where did it originate? Was her CBC monitored? Was her vitals monitored? If so, how often? What was her PT/PTT pre-operatively & postoperatively? Was something nicked? Was it vaginally? Did they attempt a blood transfusion? Did they attempt to stop the cause of the bleed?
There are so many unanswered questions here.

My horror story,

[After my cesarean] they medicated me and took my baby back to the nursery. They told me they would bring him back at 1am to breastfeed. They did not. I awoke at 6am when they did my vitals, which was done by a tech, at the beginning of each 12 hour shift. Q 12 hour vitals are not enough to detect a potential postoperative problem. They never brought my baby back. I asked for him, and was told, soon. I called again at 7am and they were in the middle of a shift change. I called again at 7:45am and was told the babies were being seen by the docs and he would be brought to me after. 8:30am I called down and was told that he was being seen by the doc. 9 am, the doc came into my room, no baby. No nurse. It had not even been 24 hours since his c/s birth. I was still medicated, still could not feel my legs, I was in compression boots, still had the foley catheter, still had the IV. The doc sat at the foot of my bed and proceeded to tell me that my baby had stopped breathing, needed resuscitation. There were other details but all I could hear was my baby stopped breathing. He WAS fine when he was with me. He left me there, by myself. I called down to the nurse, that I needed her NOW. No one came for the 15 minutes that I was on the phone with my mother and my husband telling them what had happened and to come down. I had to call the nurses station again, this time, demanding that a nurse come and release me from everything or I would do it myself.  For God Sake my baby nearly died. One came, and an hour later I was being wheeled down to see my baby… nothing urgent to them. Not enough staff to meet the needs of the patients. My son is wonderful, thank GOD, he is 16 months old! But if I could not get nursing support, and I was calling for it, who is to say that this was not part of the problems in these Underwood cases?

Tiffani, RN

http://icanofcapeatlantic.blogspot.com/