My new doctor had let a baby die – so why wasn’t I told?
I just wanted to do the very best for my baby
LYING in the hospital bed, I listened carefully to my baby’s heartbeat as it thumped through a monitor on my belly. For a few hours, myself and my partner Gavin had been chatting and playing games as we awaited the arrival of our first child.
I had been induced and we were nervous but calm, and I’d even managed to doze off for a while. Suddenly, though, the monotonous ‘dumdum, dum-dum’ began to slow and fade. It had done this a few times before and we’d been told it was a result of the baby moving. We slid the monitor around as we had done earlier, but this time it didn’t pick up pace.
I immediately felt that something wasn’t right and Gavin picked up on my panic. I was about to tell him to go and find the midwife: he was already halfway out the door. The corridor was empty but he could hear voices in another delivery suite. He hesitated, wondering whether he should disturb them. Then a voice in his head screamed, ‘It’s your baby, what are you standing here for?’ so he just barged in.
While he was trying to track down help, I was lying in the bed with a growing sense of fear.
The heartbeat was getting slower and more faint. I was only alone for a few minutes but it felt endless.
When Gavin reappeared with Felicity, our midwife, she listened, looked at the trace showing my contractions, moved the monitor around and then said: ‘I think it’s time we got this baby out.’
I couldn’t believe how quickly the mood in our delivery room had gone from relaxed and serene to something quite different.
Felicity left the room and Gavin and I looked at each other. Neither of us spoke, we just silently willed that fading heartbeat to pick up pace.
My biggest fear in the run-up to my labour had been a forceps delivery, but at that moment I didn’t care what they had to do to bring my baby into the world safely.
Felicity was back within minutes, explaining quickly how I should push as she gathered together everything for the delivery. I had an epidural and couldn’t feel anything from the waist down, which left me feeling completely helpless. She told me to have a practise push, then told me that I was going to have to work much harder. She kept glancing over her shoulder at the clock, which became unnerving.
I’ve completed a marathon and rowed in head races on the Thames but I have never pushed my body as hard as I did that day.
Both Felicity and Gavin were holding my legs up — as I physically couldn’t — and shouting encouragement.
After 20 minutes my baby girl Lois was born. I’d always imagined I would cry tears of joy when my first child was born but I couldn’t. I think I was in too much shock. I couldn’t believe how quickly my labour had turned from straightforward to a race against time, not that I even realised at the time how serious it could have been.
When I think back to that moment in August 2011, when the heartbeat monitor started to slow, it makes me shudder to think what might have been.
Then this week I discovered something even more chilling. I learned that more than three years earlier, in a situation very similar to my own, Roberta Dodd had attended the same hospital as me, was also induced using an oxycotin drip and had the same consultants handling her case — Dr Gerry Rafferty and Dr Valerie Donnelly. Her baby’s heartbeat also started slowing down. But Roberta wasn’t as lucky as I was.
While I brought my beautiful baby daughter home with me two days later and have watched her blossom into a healthy, chatty child, Roberta’s son Senan died two days after he was born.
The two obstetricians had ignored – or failed to correctly interpret – a foetal heart trace which showed the unborn baby was in distress, the High Court heard this week. The trace showed the baby’s heart rate was slowing at 3.50pm, but he was not delivered until four hours later.
The court was told an expert witness would have given evidence that if Senan had been delivered within an hour or even 90 minutes of the slow heart rate being detected he would have been fine. But baby Senan was not delivered immediately. He was deprived of oxygen and suffered brain damage. He died on March 30, 2008, in Holles Street Hospital.
This week, Dr Rafferty and Dr Donnelly, along with Mount Carmel Hospital, apologised in the High Court to Roberta and her husband David and acknowledged fault in the management of Senan’s delivery.
Although my over-riding feeling is one of intense sadness for Roberta and David, I am also angry that three years after Senan’s death, these same two doctors took charge of the delivery of my child – and yet I knew nothing of the case against them.
On Thursday, it emerged that Dr Gerry Rafferty is no longer practising medicine, having faced 11 legal actions relating to claims of medical negligence that name him as a defendant since 2009. The fact that Dr Rafferty is no longer practising is, I believe, to the benefit of women in Ireland.
That it is by his choice and not as the result of censure by his profession’s regulatory body — the Medical Council of Ireland — angers me. That he was recommended to me by a staff member at Mount Carmel concerns me.
I was a first-time mother, with all the conflicting feelings of joy and fear that that brings. I had no idea what to expect, I just wanted to do the very best for my baby.
I was trying to do everything ‘right’, researching the healthiest foods I could eat, the best exercise I could take, the relaxation techniques that would keep me and my baby calm throughout the pregnancy.
Yet when it came to the people put in charge of making sure my baby arrived safely, the information available to me was incomplete.
I wouldn’t buy a buggy without first reading every possible review to check its safety, so why are mothers-to-be expected to choose consultants with access to only the most scant information about their performance?
With hindsight, I would urge every mum-to-be to check their consultant against the Medical Council of Ireland’s register. (In the case of Dr Gerry Rafferty this could have been difficult as he is registered under the name Patrick Gerard Rafferty.)
If there are any conditions attached to a consultant’s continued practice these may be revealed, but not any Fitness To Practise inquiries pending and not, if for some reason, the council decides not to identify them.
It’s incredibly unfair that the onus is on mothers-to-be to actively seek out this information — especially first-time mothers like me who really don’t know what to expect.
I had chosen Mount Carmel after I attended for a ten-week scan. On arrival, Gavin and I saw a modern, clean clinic — a far cry from the horror stories of crumbling, unsanitary hospitals we were reading about almost daily at that time.
I was in a demanding job, which required working very long hours and was finding the sickness and tiredness difficult. I wanted to be able to tell my employer I was pregnant and would have been waiting until I was 16 weeks along for my first scan in the Coombe, my initial choice of hospital, so we decided to speed things up a little.
During the scan the ultrasound technician mentioned that they had just started a semi-private clinic and referred us to an administrator who talked us through it. When we decided to go for it the lady asked which consultant I wanted. I said I didn’t know and she recommended Dr Gerry Rafferty. ‘He’s very good, very nice,’ she said.
This was in 2011, three years after the death of Senan Dodd. Three years after Dr Gerry Rafferty failed to diagnose an ectopic pregnancy in Michelle Howe which led to her undergoing emergency surgery to remove a fallopian tube. And four years after his negligence during and following a hysterectomy on another patient, Cathy Coyle, led to her losing the function of one of her kidneys.
In the case of Cathy Coyle, the Fitness To Practise committee of the General Medical Council of Ireland last year found Dr Rafferty’s evidence to be ‘inconsistent and lacking in credibility in significant respects’.
It enrages me that he was still practising following these events.
Throughout my pregnancy Gavin and I met Dr Rafferty every few months, at a cost of more than €200 a time.
We hadn’t heard of his reputation as a Maserati- driving ‘ rock star’ consultant and were, at first, buoyed by his confidence. Gavin, a sports