Mother Indira and baby Aaliyah doing fine.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: A desi father is fuming at the staff of a Florida hospital after, as he alleges, all nurses and nearby staff abandoned him and his wife while she was going into labor, forcing him to deliver their newborn baby daughter on his own.
On the night of Saturday, February 22, Zaheer Ali drove his wife, Indira, to the Bethesda Hospital East in Boynton Beach, as she had begun going into labor for her third child. Once she was checked into a hospital room, the attending nurse noted that Indira was not yet at the appropriate stage of labor for delivery to begin, so she hooked her up to a Pitocin drip, which sped up contractions and essentially induced labor.
At the time that Indira was ready to give birth, however, another delivery in a nearby room required more attention, and supposedly diverted all the nurses in the area, leaving Indira and Zaheer alone. Speaking to the Palm Beach Post, Ali said that the nurse told him he would have to wait, and stopped the drip before heading off. What’s more, Indira was apparently never given an epidural (anesthesia) when the labor pains began, intensifying to the point that she was screaming.
Thirty minutes later, says Zaheer, the nurses and attending obstetrician, Dr. Elana Deutsch, came back and found that baby Aaliyah had been delivered – by her own father. She only had to cut the umbilical cord.
However, hospital staff tells a different story. According to them, the nurse who was assigned to assist with Indira’s delivery left the room momentarily not to help with a different delivery, but to get Deutsch, who says that the nurse was still new and simply was not ready to be alone during a delivery. Speaking to the same paper, Deutsch said that the C-section delivery she was working on only took half an hour, and that by the time she came to the room, the baby was already delivered.
Additionally, hospital spokeswoman Lisa Kronhaus said that a thorough investigation was conducted which shows that a nurse was present in the room. Kronhaus says the hospital had a 1-to-1 nurse-to-patient ratio, and that Ali was only alone when the baby crowned – the rest of the delivery was done by a nurse.
To help resolve the situation, the hospital issued an apology and even moved the family to one of its VIP suite, but Ali is still upset, saying that “sorry” isn’t good enough and that more should have been done. Indira and baby Aaliyah were discharged from the hospital on Tuesday morning. There is no word yet on whether or not Ali will take any kind of legal action against the hospital.
The following video of the story is courtesy of the Daily Mail:
To contact the author, email to deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com