Body missing from POSGH

Earline Owen’s baby died last Sunday, a week after birth, but now she is being told that the baby’s body is missing from the mortuary of Port-of-Spain General Hospital. Relating events to Newsday, a distraught Owen, 33, pleaded for the hospital to locate her baby’s body, so she can be given a burial in accordance with her expressed wishes. Pregnant for 43 weeks, dangerously beyond the normal 36 to 38 weeks, on October 5 the Diego Martin mother-of-six gave birth to a baby girl weighing just over eight pounds. Suffering with a lung infection and blockage, the baby was kept in intensive care,  fighting for her life. She survived for eight days. Sadly on Sunday, October 12, at 9.10 am she died.

Owen related: “The doctor said to me ‘you have never had a chance to hold your baby, so now we are giving you that chance’”. The hospital asked her if she wanted her baby’s body for burial or whether the hospital should take it. “The doctor said that the hospital disposing of the baby meant the baby would be cremated but that you will not be able to see, or to ever know when or where it was done”. Owen opted to take the body and told the doctor, her intention, that same Sunday morning. “The doctor said to come back next day, Monday, to fill out the form to indicate I would be taking the body and that the doctor would also have to register the death of the baby. I returned as instructed on Monday. I was told the ward clerk at the Prem Unit had not come out to work. But I signed the form the doctor had given me stating I would take the baby and bury her.” On Tuesday Owen met the ward clerk and they both went to the Medical Records Department to sign the death book and to collect the death certificate.

“But on Wednesday morning when Nella’s Funeral Home went to the hospital mortuary to collect the baby’s body, they were told that the mortuary could not locate the body. Nella’s went back later that day but the mortuary still could not locate the body”. On Thursday Owen went to the mortuary to try to locate the body. She said: “They still could not find it”. But a worker told her the baby might have accidently been taken out in a pile of body parts like limbs, hands and feet to be incinerated at Mount Hope Hospital. Owen said the clerk of Medical Records confirmed to her that he had sent the Mortuary the notes to let them know the baby was to be buried, but another person, at the Mortuary, told Owen the Mortuary had no record of ever receiving the baby. Owen, visibly weary from sleepless nights, bemoaned: “I didn’t get the chance to bring closure as they have denied me the right to lay my baby in the way I wanted”.

Displaying a $450 receipt, she said: “I had planned the funeral. I had got a garment to bury my baby in. I wanted to place a teddy bear and a rose in her coffin. Her little coffin is now lying in Nella’s Funeral Home with no body”. Speculating what really happened to her baby, she asked whether the baby was taken for experiments, body parts or organs, or whether she was simply dumped and discarded. Owen lamented: “The level of callousness shown, with no respect for the dead...”. Newsday was unable to contact the hospital administrator for a comment. But information reaching Newsday indicated that the baby’s body was thought to have been accidentally incinerated, although no-one was prepared to say so on record.