Comment: Becoming a parent is one of the greatest joys on this earth, but as the past few years have also taught me, it can also bring life’s toughest challenges. Challenges that have tested not only my personal strength but also my faith in medical and child safety processes.
In 2023 we were gearing up for what should have been a joyous time: the birth of my daughter Hunter’s* first children and my first grandchildren – twin boys. I’d like to say the pregnancy and labour was a nice experience, but in reality, from the beginning it was one challenge after another.
From severe morning sickness and extreme weight loss (hyperemesis gravidarum), to gestational diabetes; threatened early delivery which resulted in cervical cerclage where a doctor stitched her cervix closed; and labour difficulties that lasted two weeks.
At 34 weeks one of the twin’s waters broke and Hunter began infrequent contractions. Doctors said they removed the cerclage stitches, put her on antibiotics, and monitored the twins for about three days before sending her home with a plan to induce her at 37 weeks.
At almost 36 weeks she went into full-blown labour and went back to hospital. Despite the midwife saying she could feel one of the twin’s head and hair, my daughter wouldn’t dilate past 5cm. They gave her multiple doses of the labour-inducing drug oxytocin. After 15 hours of labour with no progression, she was finally sent for an emergency c-section. However, as they were testing to make sure she was numb, she could still feel everything. She was told they couldn’t give her any more numbing medication and had to carry on with the c-section, so she felt the entire procedure.
The twins’ delivery didn’t end our challenges. While Hunter was recovering, a doctor lifted her blankets and discovered a pool of blood under her. Hunter had a postpartum haemorrhage that saw her lose 2.3 litres of blood and need emergency surgery. It was very soon discovered that doctors had not removed all the stitches in her cervix from the cerclage, which had prevented her from dilating, and the labour from progressing normally.
Meantime, because the twins had breathing problems and jaundice they stayed in Waikato Hospital’s NICU for one week and then a room on another ward for two more weeks. Hunter was then able to bring her babies home (with instructions to give the boys high-dose vitamin D drops every day for a year), and I returned to Australia where I live.
But if we’d thought the past nine months had been difficult, they were nothing compared to what we were about to face. When the twins were eight-weeks-old, my daughter Facetimed me as something wasn’t right with one of them. After a brief discussion I recommended she take him to hospital, where things escalated very quickly and our nightmare began. It was established they were having seizures and within hours the babies were airlifted to Starship Hospital for emergency brain surgery and subsequently placed in induced comas.
So, with the babies en route to Starship, my daughter, by now distraught, rushed home to pack so she and her partner could drive north to Auckland to be with the babies. By now the early hours of the morning, there was a heavy knock on the door. It was two police detectives who had been called by Waikato Hospital, and there and then, the abuse allegations began.
For four hours she and her partner were questioned – all this while she had no idea if her babies were dead or alive. Finally, at around 7am, she was allowed to leave for Starship. When she arrived, she was told the twins had injuries that were so severe that one of them may potentially not survive. They were each diagnosed with subdural bleeding and a skull fracture – one twin had his on the left side, the other on his right side.
As a grandparent – well, as anyone really – we assume that doctors, medical professionals and hospitals know what they are doing and we blindly place our trust and faith in them. Even when little red flags start to appear we tell ourselves they know what they are doing and everything will be alright. Those red flags began appearing while my daughter started her labour two weeks before the twins were born and continued when the twins were in NICU and beyond. Everything we raised was explained away. For example, when one of the twins’ heads was getting bigger in those first weeks at home, this was explained away by “normal” growth; a lack of crying while in NICU was explained away as he’s “just the quiet twin and his brother is the noisy one”.
However, nothing prepares you for sitting in a meeting and being told by Dr Patrick Kelly, the head paediatrician for Starship’s child protection team, that your grandchildren’s injuries are the result of a “violent assault” and that someone has done this to them. That is what happened when I arrived at Starship after getting on the next available flight to Auckland. That’s when our whole world was kicked out from beneath us.
Your mind races and you start to consider and question everything. You look for anything that could possibly explain the ‘injuries’ and then, when you raise those plausible considerations, such as your daughter’s medical history, traumatic labour and the doctors leaving stitches in, you are quickly dismissed.
I cannot begin to put into words the level of my frustration in presenting medically reasonable alternatives for consideration and having them ignored. They left stitches in her cervix that prevented her from fully dilating and wondered why her labour wasn’t progressing. Surely those circumstances provided a reasonable explanation worthy of, at the least, consideration. To watch your daughter go through such treatment during labour was one thing but to then be disregarded was another.
We are all brought up to respect doctors, to hold them up on some pedestal. That in times of pain a doctor will help and heal, and yet in the case of my daughter and grandsons, Dr Patrick Kelly has created more pain and harm than any one person should ever know.
A pain that will never go away.
But it got worse.
No police prosecution has ever eventuated, but after surgery and being taken out of their induced coma, at 3.5 months old and the day after Hunter’s birthday, the twins were discharged from hospital directly into Oranga Tamariki custody and put into a foster home. Oranga Tamariki would not allow them to live with me because I live in Australia.
Ever since they were taken two years ago, the boys have lived in four foster homes, none of them family. My daughter gets to have a supervised visit with her sons once every three weeks.
As a grandmother my pain is different from my daughter’s – I carry not just my pain but also that of my daughter and my grandchildren. The pain of watching my daughter go through all of this, of seeing her miss out on the joy of motherhood, of having her children placed in foster care and be accused of something she didn’t do. Many days we’ve not quite known what to do and felt the whole world was against us. Other days we experienced small wins which drove us and strengthened our hope. So many firsts have passed us all by and these days were often the toughest: birthdays, first steps, first words, Easter, first Mother’s and Father’s Day, Christmas.
For over two years our lives have been on hold due to the failure of a system that places so much power in the hands of one person. Every minute of every day has been all about getting the twins back and proving the injuries were not caused by someone, as claimed by Dr Kelly, but by which seem quite obviously to be birth related, “medical misadventure” (it’s difficult to deliver babies when your cervix is still partially stitched closed), and matching left and right head fractures – a clear series of events that can be explained. But no one wanted to listen.
We continue to argue to the authorities that this is a clear case of medical misadventure, and for the twins’ return.
Hope is what gets you through those tough days; the days when you wish you could crawl into a ball and escape the world; the days when you wish for it all to be over.
Hope changes over time.
In the beginning it’s hope that the twins will wake from their comas, that they will be able to be moved out of NICU, that they will be able to eat, walk, laugh and do things that a normal infant can do. (Despite Dr Kelly’s warnings that they would both have “severe and permanent disability”, the boys are meeting all their milestones.) Then that turns to hope you can see them more, get them back; hope that one day I can take them to the zoo, celebrate Christmas together. Hope that we can one day be a family and put these events behind us.
Hope sometimes comes from where you least expect it. One of our lawyers recommended listening to Diagnosis of a Crime and within 10 minutes of listening to the Central Otago farmers’ story I thought “that’s us” – the similarities were remarkable. It was a hard listen. On one hand I was relieved to know we weren’t alone, but on the other I felt angry it had happened to others and was continuing to happen. Why us? I decided to reach out to Melanie Reid and Bonnie Sumner to share my daughter’s story and thank them for giving a voice to these cases. In return they have provided us with some real hope, and some validation in questioning the medical ‘diagnosis’. They have helped us to consider where to look, who to turn to and what questions to ask.
My hope is that truth will prevail. You have to trust that it will. Hope that something will change and that this will never be allowed to happen to another family. Hope that some good comes from all of this. That processes are put in place that prevent one person from wielding so much power over people’s lives and that families have other options available to them to seek answers rather than lengthy and costly legal battles.
These days hope is all that I have, and I hold onto it with whatever I have left.
*Not her real name
The author is a mother to five children, and the twins’ grandmother and was born in Auckland but currently lives in Brisbane, Australia. She has nearly 30 years’ experience as a teacher in both countries, specialising in behaviour, disability and trauma-informed teaching practices. She has a master’s degree in inclusive education, worked with countless at-risk and disengaged youth and presented at a national conference for alternative teaching and learning.
