She denounces Basurto for sending her to the delivery house and giving birth two hours later on her portal

Despite her youth – she is 25 years old – Nerea Sánchez is the mother of two girls, two years and four months old. Her little girl, Keyla, should have been named Alexandra because her uncle ‘Alex’ of hers served as a makeshift midwife and helped bring her into the world. She was born on the doorstep of the house, just two hours after her mother was discharged from the Basurto hospital, where she had gone with contractions. There she was examined by a gynecologist, who certified that she was dilated between “two and three centimeters” and sent her home despite not being monitored.

Nerea, who is a laboratory technician at a Biscayan hospital and had already gone through a birth before, began to feel that the time of delivery was approaching on January 3, but “I endured as long as I could.” She was 38 weeks and three days, at which point a pregnancy is considered ‘full-term’. At half past two in the morning on January 4, while they were watching a movie at home, the young woman asked her brother, ‘Alex’, 31, who lives in Barcelona but was spending Christmas with the family, to would take to the hospital.

Once in the Basurto emergency room, “they put monitors on me” for half an hour. As advised, the young woman controlled her contractions, which were at shorter intervals each time. When an assistant passed by her room, she would ask the medical team to see her because the pain was increasing. “You have to wait because they are in another delivery,” she answered. Despite being alone in the room, at three in the morning she was removed from the monitor that reports the frequency and intensity of uterine dynamics.

The gynecologist couldn’t examine her until five. In that time, the contractions had been increasing and were already every two or three minutes. “I understand that I am not the only person they have to attend to, but they should still put more doctors.” The specialist observed that she was dilated between “two and three centimeters” out of a maximum of ten and did an ultrasound. “She told me to take a shower, eat something and try to sleep and come back in the morning,” she recalls. Nerea thought: «How is it possible that they send me home if I have them very often? But if they tell me, it will be because it is so. She lives in Lemoa, so it took them half an hour to get there. She tried to bathe, sleep… but her pain was unbearable. She ate a yogurt and it made her sick. Her parents encouraged her to return to Basurto. “But I’ve just been there,” she justified herself. And she kept holding on. Around seven in the morning “I went into the bathroom and I saw blood. I got scared and asked my brother to take me to the ER.

«In the elevator I began to feel my head and I screamed twice. My brother picked me up to take me to the car. ‘Alex, there is no time! And I dropped my pants.” At the time of childbirth, women feel an irrepressible instinct to push. “‘Well, Nerea, it’s going to be here,'” she thought. The young man, who has studied psychology and works in a company outside the health sector, called 112 and while he held the mobile with his shoulder, he helped his sister with his hands. «I touched myself and felt the girl’s head. ‘Alex, don’t let it fall, catch it’”.

13 days with bronchiolitis

«The girl was leaving me. I hardly even had to push. She was born while I was standing. It was all very fast.” Alex cleared the baby’s airway and gave it to her mother after she burst into tears. Over the phone, they told him to look for warm clothes. The temperatures at that time-he was born at 7:15 a.m.-were around zero degrees. He took off his jacket so that Nerea could sit with the girl and a neighbor brought down blankets.

First, a Basic Life Support ambulance arrived, but the medicalized one took almost an hour. So, she had the cord clamped and was taken back to the hospital, where she delivered the placenta. There she ran into the gynecologist who had discharged her. “These births are like that,” she justified herself. They stayed only one night in Basurto, but after three days, due to the cold that had happened in the portal, the little girl was admitted to the ICU again with bronchiolitis and stayed for 13 days. “That was the hardest. I had never had such a bad time in my life. So small, with the respirator. She’s three days with you and you have to leave her in an incubator. A lot of things go through your head.”

The young woman, represented by the Gómez Menchaca law firm, has filed a claim for damages against Osakidetza “because this cannot happen in the year we are in.” “I think it has not been given enough importance. No one has been aware of what it is like to give birth in a portal without medical assistance, of what could have happened to the girl or to me in the event of any mishap », she warns.

Osakidetza, for his part, alleges that he complied with the protocol, according to which, a woman in labor does not enter until the cervix is ​​four centimeters dilated. In addition, the percentage of “precipitated deliveries”, as they are known, “is minimal, 3%” and “there is no way to predict that it will develop in this way.”

• Themes
• Basurto Hospital
• Maternity