MANILA, Philippines — A 26-year-old woman who had just given birth passed away five hours later on Friday night after six hospitals refused to accept her for different reasons.
Katherine Bulatao had chosen to give birth at their house in Barangay 183, North Caloocan City, with the help of a midwife to avoid being infected with the new coronavirus disease. However, after her baby was born, the midwife told her husband, Jan Christian, to bring her to a hospital because she was bleeding.
When the couple went to a lying-in clinic, they were told Bulatao had to be transferred to a bigger medical facility. She was provided an oxygen tank and intravenous fluids before the couple went to another hospital in Caloocan which said it had no blood supply available for a transfusion.
The couple tried two more hospitals in Fairview, Quezon City, but one said it had no available operating room. The staff at the other hospital said the couple had to pay a downpayment of P30,000 before Bulatao could be admitted.
“I didn’t have the money with me that time. So I said that I would go home and get the money, but they should admit my wife. At that time, she was already having a hard time breathing and she had already lost a lot of blood,” Jan Christian said.
A doctor then advised him to find another hospital if he could not give the downpayment.
“The hospital was really far and my wife was having chills. We just went to Bulacan which was just near our place,” Jan Christian told the Inquirer in an interview.
On the way to Bulacan, they stopped by another hospital which also turned them away because it was not equipped to operate on Bulatao.
“By the time we arrived at another hospital, it was already 8 p.m. My wife had been suffering for four hours,” Jan Christian narrated.
But the hospital did not have an obstetrician-gynecologist at that time so the couple left. The situation was also the same at the next hospital.
Their final stop was a public hospital in San Jose del Monte, Bulacan, which finally agreed to admit Bulatao. By that time, it had been five hours since she gave birth and doctors failed to revive her.
“Her death certificate said that she lost a lot of blood,” Jan Christian said, adding that his wife could have survived had she been given immediate medical attention.