A Russian-speaking family from Sacramento lost their unborn baby due to negligence of local hospital’s doctors. Or at least that is the opinion of the victim, Tatyana Tutelya, an immigrant from Moldova. Some time before the delivery the mother felt that her 10-pound baby’s heart has stopped beating. Sacramento doctors did not pay proper attention to the woman’s condition, so the family lost a baby who could otherwise grow up big and strong.
As Dmitry Iurco and Tatyana Tutelya told Slavic Sacramento, they lost their unborn son because of the doctors’ flagrant negligence.
When she was carrying her fifth baby, 43-year-old Tatyana Tutelya could not imagine how unprofessionally, carelessly and heartlessly Sutter Memorial Hospital’s doctors could treat a new life.
“I was 36 weeks pregnant and my due date was calculated as January 8th 2015,” Tatyana, the mother of the baby, told SlavicSac.com’s correspondents. “I arrived to the hospital at 5 PM. I was already having contractions, and I knew from my previous four pregnancies that the baby was about to be born.”
While describing her medical condition to the doctors, Tatyana repeatedly told them that she was about to give birth “immediately, this day”.
After checking the amniotic fluid volume and performing an ultrasound test, the nurses at Sutter Memorial assured the mother that “the baby’s heart is beating strong”. For some reason blood tests or even urine tests have not been performed, despite the woman’s complaints about extreme pain.
“Come back to us when your waters break,” they told her. But the waters never broke and her condition was getting worse and worse each day.
According to the 43-year-old mother, “both the medical personnel and her doctor were very unprofessional and neglected their duties.” “They didn’t even give me a hospital gown when I came there the first time,” says Tatyana, crying. The miserable mother assures us that she does have Medi-Cal insurance.
Tatyana was pregnant with an 11-pound baby, and she has told the hospital personnel that she had to have an urgent surgery. But Tatyana did not have the surgery that day because her doctor, Tatyana Magdeberg, has forgotten to sign the C-section consent form. The only treatment she has received was some Vistaril to relieve the spasms.
The next day the pregnant woman went to Capitol OB/GYN medical center to sign the necessary papers for the C-section. Her regular doctor was not in, so Tutelya was seen by another doctor who said that “the baby was OK” and there was nothing to worry about.
“He measured me with a regular tape measure and said that the baby was ‘normal’, its heart was beating and there was nothing to worry about,” adds Tatyana.
During that day, as well as previous two weeks, Tatyana has not been feeling well, which she told her doctors repeatedly.
At the Capitol OB/GYN’s registration desk she was told that “doctors often forget to verify the C-section forms”.
“We just had a meeting on this very subject,” she was told, and the surgery remained scheduled for January 29th despite her insistence.
The woman could not wait for another three weeks, so after suffering through the weekend she started another battle with the uncooperating medical workers on Monday.
She finally obtained the proper paperwork and went home. That night she has stopped feeling the movements of her baby. The next day the concerned mother went to the hospital where the doctors officially pronounced the fetus dead.
“The doctors were about to send me home – to spend the night with the dead baby inside me! My husband and I insisted that the surgery had to be performed as soon as possible,” Tatyana tells us, “and the operation finally began at 11 PM!”
“Dmitry weighed almost 5 kg when he was born, but unfortunately, it was too late for him,” writes in a letter to Slavic Sacramento one of the relatives, Lika Molchanov.
The doctors stated that the baby had been dead in its mother’s womb for at least several hours.
“Dmitry was the fifth child in Tutelya’s family. The 10-pound boy was ready to be born, but the doctors in their carelessness delayed the delivery by almost two weeks – which caused our irrevocable loss!” the relatives of the Russian-speaking family say with resentment.
“The mother’s pregnancy was going well,” they stress. “If only the doctors listened to her and signed the papers in time when she was ready to give birth, the baby would be 6 days old today!”
We should mention that this is not the first time Sutter Memorial’s personnel are accused of unprofessional conduct and even charlatanism. For example, one of Sacramento residents has recently complained that Sutter Memorial billed him $55,000 for a routine appendix removal.
Besides, the notorious drama of another Russian-speaking couple, Anna and Alexander Nikolayevs, whose baby was seized from them by the Child Protective Services, has unfolded within the walls of that same hospital.
