I still feel the emptiness every day... knowing that my baby boy died so needlessly
Fiona Tuite’s devastation at her son’s death after childbirth was compounded when she discovered the horrifying truth...
‘I still feel the same emptiness, loneliness sadness’
ALARGE oval-shaped locket made of white gold, with an intricate floral design etched on to the surface, hangs around Fiona Tuite’s neck. Inside, the two photos facing each other are of her sons, Evan and Jayden, both taken shortly after they were born.
It’s a sizeable and undoubtedly expensive piece of jewellery, one that looks slightly out of place with Fiona’s casual outfit of jeans and a check shirt. But she wears it all the time, no matter how she is dressed, keeping these baby pictures of her two boys close to her heart at all times.
The one of Evan is particularly precious. A few hours after it was taken on July 14, 2012, the infant died in her arms.
An inquest last week heard that the cause of his death was ‘severe external and internal cranial and brain injury and haemorrhage due to a difficult instrumental delivery’. In other words, his skull was fractured by one of the instruments used during his birth.
The inquest returned a verdict of ‘medical misadventure,’ after it heard how there were six attempts made using either a forceps or vacuum to deliver the baby. A High Court case in January 2018, taken against Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda, where Evan was born, heard how the circumstances of his death were ‘quite horrific’.
On the day the case against the HSE was settled with Evan’s parents — Fiona and her former fiancé Ivan Murphy — the hospital finally apologised to them for ‘the deficit in care’ during their baby’s birth. It would seem, however, that the results of the inquest and court case have meant little to Fiona.
‘I feel just the same,’ she tries to explain. ‘I’m relieved obviously that they are both over and I don’t have to go through it again, but I still have the same feeling in my stomach. I still feel
the same emptiness, loneliness and sadness. Some days are worse than others, but it never goes away.
‘There’s the constantly knowing that it could have been prevented — that if I’d been sent for a C-section, it would have been fine.’
Fiona is remarkably and heartbreakingly honest about the devastating effects the death of first-born had on her life.
She immediately sank into a deep depression after losing Evan, and as a result saw her tenyear relationship with the man she planned to marry implode. The house they had shared then had to be sold and she found herself living back with her parents.
‘We just went in opposite directions from each other,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t get out of bed and Ivan couldn’t deal with looking at me in the bed. He was keeping himself going by keeping busy, while I didn’t want to leave the house. He was trying his best to help me, but I just couldn’t help myself. It was just the way I felt.’
Thankfully Fiona eventually managed to pull herself out of this crippling bleakness with the help of her new partner Joe, a friend she got closer to after her engagement to Ivan was called off. And much to her surprise, very shortly after this blossoming relationship began, she found herself pregnant again. Jayden was born in July 2014.
‘When I found out I was pregnant, it was a shock,’ she admits. ‘A very nice shock. But I was a nervous wreck the whole way through, I had loads of hospital appointments. I went back to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, I felt they knew my history and I dealt directly with a particular doctor I trusted, I wouldn’t talk to anyone else. I asked for a C-section. I don’t think I could have gone through a labour again, not mentally.’
When you learn of the full circumstances of Fiona’s first delivery, her deep-seated anxiousness is understandable.
Working as a shop assistant in a jewellery shop in Drogheda, Fiona first started going out with Ivan Murphy, a self-employed plasterer, when she was 22 years old. The couple moved in together, to a house in north Drogheda.
‘We got engaged and made the decision to start a family,’ she says. ‘I got pregnant in 2011 but had a miscarriage at six weeks. We were excited about having a baby so it was very upsetting. When I got pregnant with Evan we were excited again, but we were nervous as well. But everything went fine, it was a happy and healthy pregnancy with no problems at all.
‘I decided to go with the Midwifery Led Unit but once I got to my due date and I was gong over, they transferred me to the hospital. I went two weeks over and they brought me in on June 13, 2012.
‘I got two gels that day to try and help bring on the labour, to induce me, one in the morning and one in the evening.’
She spent that night on the prelabour ward.
‘I had bad cramping all through the night, which I told the nurse about, she said they were normal,’ she says. ‘When they examined me just before 5am, they told me I was 6-7cm dilated. Everything was rushed then, I was brought down to the delivery room and when I got there they told me I was now 9-10cm dilated.
‘Things were hectic. I couldn’t get the epidural because I was too far gone, so I’d no pain relief. I didn’t really know what was going on, I was in so much pain.
‘But I do remember that Evan’s heart rate was going down and they were telling me to push. I was trying, but nothing was happening. They were telling me the baby needed to come out. At about 6.15am, the doctor went in with forceps, then a vacuum.
‘I remember one of the midwives saying to the doctor: “We’ll bring her down for a C-section.” But the doctor said: “No, we’re going to do it here.”
‘They insisted on delivering Evan, and he was born at 6.29am. He didn’t cry and they put him on my stomach, very briefly, before rushing off with him. I remember that he was very floppy.’
Last week the inquest heard that between 6.16am and 6.29am, the doctor used a forceps, then a vacuum cup and then the forceps again to deliver Evan. After he was born he was taken to the special care unit and at 10.30am he had to be resuscitated.
During the High Court case last year it was claimed medical records indicated that when Evan arrived in the unit he had bruising to the ear lobe and all over his skull and had skin peeling over his scalp. He required ventilation and was intubated and a CT scan showed a global hypoxic injury and evidence of haemorrhage.
Fiona says she was unaware of exactly how difficult Evan’s birth had been. ‘I just knew it was an awful delivery,’ she says. ‘But as it
‘I remember that he was very floppy’
‘If there was a window, I’d have jumped out of it’
was my first, I thought maybe it was normal.
‘My mam came into the delivery room straight afterwards and she described the place as being like a bloodbath. She actually nearly passed out.
‘They wanted to bring her down to A&E because she was fainting when she saw the place.’
After the delivery Fiona had to receive a blood transfusion.
‘I think I lost about two litres,’ she says. ‘I also had to be brought to theatre to get the placenta out, as it didn’t detach right. After that I was brought up to a six-bed ward. It was mid-morning at that stage and I was just waiting for Evan to be brought to me.
‘My mam and Ivan were in the canteen having a cup of tea when the hospital rang Ivan to tell him to come straight back over, that there was something wrong. That’s when he was told Evan wasn’t doing so well, that there was a problem.
‘At about 1pm the nurses came in and took my bed with me in it and wheeled me down to the special care unit. I was told the baby wasn’t doing too well. I don’t know why, but I did ask them at that point: “Is my baby going to die?” They never answered me.
‘At that point when I saw him, I thought he looked fine, I didn’t realise how bad it was. I didn’t think it was going to end up the way it did.
‘But then, I was a bit out of it on all the medication, I’d been under a general anaesthetic and everything was happening in a daze.’
Fiona was brought back up to the post-delivery floor, this time she was put into a room on her own.
‘At that stage I knew something was up,’ she says. ‘They brought me down once more during the day, in the bed, to the special baby unit. They were telling us they were doing different tests on him. I think now that they were breaking it to us gently that there was something seriously wrong.’
Early that evening they brought Fiona back down for a final time to the unit, once again in her bed.
‘I was sitting outside, in the bed with my whole family around me,’ she says. ‘No one ever said it directly, that he was dying, just that the tests showed there was no brain activity and they were going to have to turn the machines off.
‘It was my mam who told me to take Evan into my arms, to hold him. I’m so glad I did that now. It all felt so surreal, like a hazy nightmare, I didn’t know really what was happening. I was holding him for about five minutes and then the monitor he was hooked up to, the line on the screen went flat and the beeping stopped, he was gone.’ Evan was just over 12 hours old when he died.
Although traumatised and still recovering, Fiona managed to dress him in some of the clothes they had brought in her hospital bag. ‘We picked out a little white cardigan and a blue top and trousers with ladybugs on them,’ she says. ‘I even put a nappy on him...
‘It was my auntie who noticed the bruising, he was black and blue, even down his back.
‘I was so devastated, she didn’t say anything to me, she was pointing it out to my mam behind my back and insisted on taking photos of it. Only for my auntie we wouldn’t have had them.’
While Evan was taken to the morgue, Fiona was taken back up to the post-labour ward.
‘I tried to get some sleep that night but the following morning I needed to get out of there,’ she says. ‘I was on a floor where I could see and hear all the other babies who had just been born. I had to get out of there, so I just went home, that was the Friday.’
By the Sunday Fiona was trembling and shivering so badly, her concerned mother called the midwives who had been attending to her before the birth.
‘They came to the house and said it was vital I went back to hospital, that I needed more blood, so I went back in.’
While the hospital took care of her physical issues, Fiona’s mental state deteriorated badly.
‘I was so upset, I was uncontrollable,’ she recalls. ‘I just couldn’t handle it, the grief. If there was a window, I would have jumped out of it, that was the feeling I had. They didn’t want to let me out of the hospital without seeing a psychiatrist, so they sent me up in a taxi with a nurse to St Bridget’s Hospital, a mental health unit in Ardee.
‘But after talking to me, they knew it was just the grief that was affecting me so badly, so I was brought back to the main hospital.’
Evan’s body was released to his parents the following evening. He spent that night with them at their home, where his Precious Bearthemed nursery had been finished just a few weeks before. His funeral was on the Tuesday.
‘I don’t know how I got through the months and weeks afterwards,’ Fiona says. ‘The days just rolled into one. There was a period when I couldn’t wait until 3pm or 4pm in the afternoon to drink a brandy, I was numbing myself.’
For a while Fiona and Ivan tried to have another child.
‘We went for fertility treatment and everything but I couldn’t get pregnant,’ she says. ‘So I thought that was it. It was another massive strain on our relationship. So by the following year, we had broken up, sold the house and I was back living with my parents.’
Six months later, thankfully, she had started her new relationship and was pregnant with Jayden, a gorgeous, fair-haired four-year-old who will be starting school in September.
Ivan also moved on quickly — he now has three children with his new partner.
‘I get on with Ivan very well,’ says Fiona, who is now engaged to Joe. ‘I’m really happy for him, we’re friends now.’
It’s lucky the two have such an amicable relationship, as they have had to face not only a High Court case, but a seriously delayed inquest.
‘We have no idea why the inquest took so long,’ says Fiona. ‘Nobody could understand why it took six years and eight months. Our barrister said she’d never seen an inquest happen after a court case like that before.
‘They couldn’t get everyone together, there was always someone missing, or something that put it off. We got loads of dates for when it was supposed to happen, we’d prepare ourselves for it each time and then it would get cancelled. It was crazy, and made it so much tougher.’
Fiona and Ivan both settled with the hospital last year.
‘There were two different settlements for myself and Ivan,’ Fiona explains. ‘I didn’t physically touch any of it, it went straight to the solicitor to pay for a house I bought in Ardee. It didn’t cover the entire cost, I still had to borrow some from my dad.
‘I didn’t want to touch it, but since I lost the house in Drogheda, the logical thing to do was to put a roof over our heads, a bit of security. We plan to move into it in the next couple of months.’
At one point during our interview, Jayden arrives home with his aunt. Fiona’s face breaks into a wide smile and she jumps from her seat to open the front door. Her delight at seeing her son is a beautiful moment. ‘When Jayden starts at school I’ll probably go back to work,’ she says. ‘But since he’s been born, I’ve tried to spend every moment I can with him.
‘I lost my home, my relationship and worst of all, my son... everything. I don’t know how I got to where I am today, because looking back... well, it very nearly broke me for good. But I’ve been lucky in many ways, and I have a great family, they helped save me.’