Tiny twins shunted around hospitals
Mum ‘guilt-tripped’ into transfer, writes Cecile Meier.
Premature twins Nikau and Blake Shilling were airlifted to Wellington to make space in Christchurch’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), only to be sent to Nelson two weeks later.
Their mother, Jonelle Shilling, said the Christmas night experience was traumatic.
Overcrowding has plagued Christchurch Women’s Hospital’s NICU since it opened in 2005, as women give birth later in life and the number of at-risk pregnancies increases. Since the start of this year, there have been more babies in the unit than cots. In the past six months at least two other Christchurch women expecting twins were sent to other cities to give birth.
Shilling, from the West Coast, had an emergency caesarean in Christchurch in mid-December, at 29 weeks of gestation. The birth went well, but a week later, NICU told her they needed to send her and her newborn boys to Wellington Hospital. The unit needed the cots for two babies in urgent need. Her partner and 4-year-old daughter could not go. Shilling packed for a flight at 4.30 am.
‘‘The minute I agreed to this, no nurse or doctor made us feel comfortable at all,’’ she said.
‘‘They treated us really rudely as if we should just hurry up and get out.’’
‘‘I had no sleep at all and was crying all night.’’
The tiny 1-week-old twins were strapped down into incubators with sticky yellow earmuffs for their air ambulance journey.
‘‘It was really nerve-racking. The doctors told me it was easier to send one family and clear two beds than send two families,’’ Shilling said.
‘‘I feel like they really guilt-tripped me into leaving, not realising they were hurting my family because they were tearing us away from each other for so long while the babies grew.’’
Two weeks later, Wellington NICU was full too. The twins were sent on another air ambulance, to Nelson.
After a further two weeks, they took their third air ambulance journey, to Greymouth’s Grey Base Hospital, finally close to their Hokitika home.
‘‘I would never want another family to ever experience what I did,’’ Shilling said.
Multiple birth club committee member Katrina Howden has helped other transferred mothers since she was sent to Dunedin to give birth to twin girls in 2014.
‘‘Sending twin mums frees up two beds – they don’t want us,’’ she said.
This was unfair on mothers with twins, who were ‘‘even more sleepdeprived’’ with two babies to feed while often recovering from a caesarean.
Christchurch Women’s NICU clinical director Adrienne Lynn said transferring premature babies was rare, and a last resort.
‘‘The only times we’ve done this previously was after the February 22, 2011 earthquake.’’
Admissions to NICU were unpredictable, ‘‘so if we get an influx of critical babies who urgently require a cot, we need to prioritise [them]’’.
Christchurch’s NICU cared for up to 1000 babies a year.