It is a real drama that played out in July at the Bordeaux University Hospital and that our colleagues from the Figaro.
On July 20, Caroline Belfort, a seven-month pregnant woman, called the fire department. It has been four days since emergency regulation was put in place at the Bordeaux University Hospital. Caroline is 22 years old and has had cystic fibrosis since birth.
The young woman has “39°C fever, his elbow red, painful and has tripled in size”. And she passed out “thirty times a day”.
The firefighters, who examine him, initially believe in a mosquito bite to explain the swollen elbow. They refuse to take her to the hospital, believing that she will not lose her baby.
The ambulance that does not arrive
It is therefore her mother who takes her to the maternity ward of the CHU de Bordeaux. Caroline asks to induce labor because she hasn’t felt her baby move for several hours.
The heart of her baby then displays 190 beats per minute. “He told me that it was normal and that his heart rate had slowed down a bit because of my fever”reports Caroline to our colleagues.
The young woman is then redirected to the emergency room but which has been regulated for four days. They then refuse to take care of her and she is redirected to the Bordeaux Nord polyclinic.
The ambulance that was to take him away only arrived several hours later. Once at the Bordeaux University Hospital (following going to the Haillan hospital center where they once more refused to take care of her because “we don’t know his file”she is not installed in a room until two o’clock in the morning.
He was then asked to wait until the next morning to be operated on. “The rheumatologist who examined me had told me all the same that if it was not okay, he had to be called back at night. What I asked for, but the medical team refused”says Caroline.
Sepsis
Driven to the block at 11 a.m. on Saturday morning, she is in mortal danger. She triggered sepsis, her swollen elbow actually hiding septic arthritis (a joint infection that evolves over a few hours or days).
His mother, a nurse for 26 years, and who has “never seen such catastrophic care”says then that he was asked who he had to save between his daughter and his baby. “They had a 15% chance of saving Caroline. I chose her because she has a 15-month-old daughter”she reports to the Figaro.
The unborn baby, in cardiac arrest when he came out of Caroline’s womb, might not be revived.
“I blame them”
“I blame them. I think my situation was taken lightly, reacts Caroline. I have cystic fibrosis, I have been followed at Pellegrin since I was very young, but I have not been listened to. He might have triggered the caesarean on Thursday evening, the child was viable.”
For the young woman, she is not the first and will not be the last either. “I had 30 illnesses during the day. If we might take patients more seriously, that would be good.”
The Bordeaux University Hospital, contacted by our colleagues, assured that several members of the medical team “accompanied the patient with the utmost attention and diligence in all its components”and mentioned a “deep sympathy for the patient and her family”.
Caroline would have liked the hospital to speak to her directly to tell her all this. The young woman decided not to file a complaint “because the public hospital has no money and the chain of responsibility is complex”.
Her baby boy was buried. His name was Marius.
