A woman goes to the hospital in labor. Her personal doctor (not an employee of the hospital) is doing the delivery. The baby gets stuck at the shoulders. The doctor pulls the baby’s head off trying to get it out. The hospital then poses the body so it looks like the head is still attached to let the parents view it, not telling them what happened and telling them they couldn’t have a free autopsy. They didn’t report the details to anyone. It was the funeral home that thought it was a bit unusual to be handed a decapitated newborn that reported it.
Quick thinking!
Weekend at baby’s.
Would an autopsy be strictly necessary in this case?
It would reveal their attempt at a cover-up.
Right. I thought the fact that the head wasn’t attached to the body would be enough.
Nobody puts baby in a coroner.
It’ll be needed to determine if the baby was already dead when the birth began or if the doctor’s incompetence caused the death. The criminal charges will depend on that issue.
Omg. Head blown.
(Oops)
Go to your room.
This should be a lesson for OB-GYNs: always have plenty of Superglue on hand.
Smallest member of The Headless Hunt.
That hospital is in big trouble.
I predict heads will roll.
mmm
Decades ago, I’d just done a routine delivery when I was asked to step in to see a woman who arrived with a fetal demise in active labor. The demise had occurred at least a few days before and triggered labor at about 7 months or so. Even with that tiny of a body, deliveries of fetal deaths can be quite problematic.
And this one sure was. The head presented, but then as happens all too often in cases of demise, the body would just not come out. I followed standard protocol and continued firm traction on the head. It seemed like hours (in reality it was about 10 minutes) but finally the rest of the body came out. And the continuing traction had partially torn through the neck, perhaps a third of the way.
Very traumatic for all involved, frankly. The patient had just learned of the fetal demise after she got to the labor unit. So there was that tragedy. Plus a difficult labor.
The nurses and I made the baby look as presentable as possible so mom could see the results and photos could be taken (very important in giving closure and curtailing intrusive ideas that baby was alive but ‘taken away’), things mom wanted done. The nurses on the unit were excellent, and support, counselling etc. was mobilized.
Not long after that, I gave up OB. 99% pleasure, 1% panic and despair.
& if they’ve done enough leg amputations recently…bowling!!!
Does anyone besides me remember the childhood expression “Mama had a baby and his head popped off!”?
This was said while holding a dandelion and popping its “head” off with your thumb.
mmm
This seems to be the key issue which the news report isn’t covering. Was the baby already dead when the labor began? If so, then removing the already dead baby’s head, while sounding horribly gruesome, may have been the best thing for protecting the mother’s life.
Precisely. The news story is full of sensationalism, and short on facts. Dead tissue is fragile, pulling off a head inadvertently is not unknown, especially when time is of the essence for the woman’s health and safety.
When I was 29-30 I spent a year voluteering on the maternity ward of a local hospital. I’d done hospital volunteering before, including in an ER, so the environment wasn’t new to me – but what was new was the occasional fetal demise. If such a delivery was in progress, a plastic yellow rose would be taped to the doorframe of that room so everyone could be aware. There was a lot of joy on that floor (watching new parents put their infant in a car seat for the first time is always highly entertaining), but those cases are what eventually got to me – that, plus watching exhausted parents visit the NICU (the entrance was directly in front of the nurses’ station, which is where I hung out when I wasn’t doing anything else).
From the article above:
On Thursday, officials with Southern Regional Medical Center issued a statement saying that “this unfortunate infant death occurred in utero prior to the delivery and decapitation,” and said that the doctor who delivered the baby, Tracy St. Julian, is not “and never has been” an employee of the hospital.
Seems the decapitation was a medically defined one where the neck internals were disconnected, not a “beheading”
I observed a fetotomy (veterinary). A dairy cow was unable to deliver, and the calf not valuable enough to justify cesarean. The instrument was a two-channel tube with a wire saw running through it.
One person put their arm into the uterus and looped the saw around a part, that was then cut and removed vaginally. Then another part, until the calf was removed. Ideally, they do the head first if the calf is alive.
I heard a story about a hurried bovine fetotomy where the person looping the saw inadvertently had a finger in the loop and lost it.