The intrauterine death of a baby It's something very painful, something we don't want to think about but what happens. In this circumstance, hospitals should be prepared to give the best possible care to parents.
But hospital protocols they do not usually contemplate decent attention to parents who suffer from this process. Prenatal death in hospitals is a medical matter, and human attention is often left to chance, not a protocol that contemplates the enormous emotional dimension of this process.
Many of the wrong actions could be solved with appropriate protocols. Mothers and their partners should not be separated under any circumstances. Personal attention should be full of respect for their pain, providing privacy and allowing them to say goodbye to their child. However, this usually does not happen.
Mothers usually dilate in the same spaces as those that are going to give birth to a living child and even come to share a room with them later. The comments you hear can be very misguided.
When the lifeless baby is born, it is not usually considered that they can hug them and say goodbye to them, many times they are not allowed to see them. The situation of helplessness and lack of sensitivity increases their anguish and prevents them from doing what anyone would do, see and touch the child who left.
An imperative need is that attention to these families is contemplated with the utmost delicacy, so that they can, if that is possible, face the pain surrounded by humanity. They loved their baby and are entitled to this.
When my son was born something happened to me that I could never forget. He was leaving the monitors very distraught, because they had determined that the delivery should be advanced. A mother, pregnant about seven months, was waiting by my side to indicate the dilation room that touched each of us. She was crying, alone. No one looked at her.
I approached and asked what was wrong with him, trying to calm what I thought was fear of childbirth. He looked at me with his eyes full of nothing, as if he were in another distant and desolate place. She would also be given birth but she already knew that her baby was dead inside her belly. He told me his name, his son's name, and told me he was dead.
And she was alone at that moment, the protocols did not even contemplate that those minutes, after receiving the news, her partner would hug her. I don't know if my hug helped her in anything, but I've never forgotten her or her son.
Unfortunately I have lived after losses of babies of very close people and in addition to suffering for it, most reported the coldness with which they were treated while giving birth to a lifeless fetus. In some cases the deal was intolerable.
However, there are hospitals where prenatal loss they face each other respectfully and develop specific protocols in this regard. However, I have only managed to find out about two of them. The Donostia Hospital is a role model as we will see soon.
No parents would have to go through the experience of the prenatal death of a son However the cases happen and to attend to these families in a decent, comprehensive way, it is very important for them to live the situation with at least humanity.
