Mrs. Lillian Essien is a distraught woman. Her anguish was palpable as she spoke amidst tears. She just lost her only son — two-year-old Shawn.
Essien’s story is telling. Prior to her son’s birth, she had suffered a “terrible miscarriage” and was trying to recover when she got pregnant again. According to her, Shawn’s birth brought her joy, adding that the boy was a constant excitement to her while he lived.
She spoke in a disconsolate voice; weak, resigned and quiet. Her words were filled with anguish and cry for justice as she narrated how her son died due to an alleged negligence of a Lagos private hospital, De Vitals Cares Hospital, Ilogbo in Ojo Local Government Area.
Essien said she wanted the private hospital to be brought to book for the untimely death of Shawn. According to her, the hospital did not give her son the appropriate treatment.
She told SUNDAY PUNCH what happened on the day she took her only son to De Vitals.
“On December 9, 2015, I took my two-year-five-month-old son to De Vitals Cares Hospital at Babalola Bus Stop in Ilogbo for treatment. My child had been restless all night and had woken up weak and with yellowish eyes. We hurriedly left the house very early in the morning and got to the hospital a few minutes past 7am. They inserted a cannula (into his body), took his blood and put him on intravenous fluid immediately (after) his blood had been taken.
“I asked the medical doctor attending to him why the IV was given and what drugs were being injected into the IV, since the results of the tests weren’t out yet. And my son wasn’t passing out stool or vomiting. He murmured ‘B-complex’ and walked away. About an hour later, the doctor walked back into the room and I asked him if the test results were out and what the results of the tests were, he said he would be back and walked out again. He kept coming in and out of the room without telling me what the results were.
“This got me very worried. I started to feel something was horribly wrong with my son and that was why he didn’t want to tell me what the results were. The next time he came into the room I told him I wanted to know what the test results were and he said it was acute malaria and his PCV (packed cell volume) was 18 per cent and that he might need a blood transfusion,” Essien said.
Another IV, a saline solution, she noted was given to her son, with the hospital medical staff saying it will “wash away the yellowness from my son’s eyes.”
But her son’s condition worsened.
“My son became very restless when the second IV fluid got half way and it seemed like he was trying hard to breathe. I asked three nurses that came into the room if they had a nebulizer but they all didn’t seem to know what a nebulizer was. They said I shouldn’t be scared that it’s malaria parasite that made him restless. They kept assuring me that by the next morning, he will be fine,” Shawn’s mother said.
With Shawn’s health not improving, the hospital reportedly gave him a third and a fourth IV. At the third IV, his stomach, arms and feet were double of their sizes, his mother said. Despite the baby’s worsening condition, Essien said the hospital assured her the baby would be fine.
“My son seemed to be finding it so hard to breathe. The doctor came in again and I asked him exactly what all the IV fluids were for; that my child wasn’t passing out any stool neither was he vomiting. I don’t think he needs any more IV fluid. He left the room immediately and less than a minute later a nurse came in and said the doctor asked her to take out the IV.
“At about 10.33pm, the doctor came into the room and I said, ‘Doctor, please help me. My baby isn’t getting any better.’ He replied ‘Madam, pray to God to help you!’ He said he had decided to transfer my son and he wrote a referral letter for me to take my son to another hospital. My son had started gasping and his eyes seemed to have gone right into their sockets and looking even more yellowish,” she added.
By midnight, Essien and Shawn arrived at Isolo General Hospital. The chubby two-year-old was said to have arrived too late as he died about two minutes after he arrived the hospital.
“We got to the Isolo General Hospital, past midnight. The doctor on call seemed shocked after reading the referral letter. I remember him murmuring ‘What kind of stupid doctor administered all this medication to a child!’ He immediately put my son on oxygen and my son passed away in my arms after about two minutes.
Two weeks after Shawn’s death, Essien got a call from one Dr. Vitalis Mezie, the Chief Medical Director of the private hospital that treated her baby.
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