Mignon Underwood
AN INQUIRY has been demanded into the loss of baby Conor Underwood at Wexford General Hospital in September 2012 following alleged medical negligence in the treatment of his mother Mignon.
As the Carne mother’s traumatic experience was recounted over the national airwaves in recent days, Krysia Lynch of the Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services (AIMS) said “there has to be an investigation.
“The public need to feel reassured that what happened to you is not going to happen to anybody else in Wexford,” the advocate said to Ms. Underwood.
In order to help ensure no other mother suffers in the way which she did, the former owner of Karoo Farm Shop has been speaking publicly about her alleged treatment by her consultant during her pregnancy.
“From the day that Conor died under such tragic and unnecessary circumstances, I always felt that my purpose would be for something good to come from it,” she said.
“Basically I had pre-eclampsia, that’s the bottom line.
“It wasn’t diagnosed as such, even though it was very obvious.”
A pregnancy-complicating condition, pre-eclampsia is characterised by high blood pressure and damage to another organ, such as the kidneys.
Symptoms can include severe headaches, excess protein in urine, nausea or vomiting and changes in vision.
The first time Ms. Underwood became aware that symptoms she was experiencing may have been as a result of pre-eclampsia was when a retired midwife came into her shop and expressed her concern upon seeing how swollen the expectant mother had become.
The Carne woman contacted her consultant’s midwife that day and attended hospital on their instruction.
Despite the consultant being in the hospital on the occasion and Ms. Underwood expecting him to see her, she spoke of how she was there for two hours and “he never showed up.
“The midwives discharged me, they said I could go and as I was leaving he came in and sort of stood against the counter and folded his arms and said to me ‘what am I going to do with you?’” she recalled.
At a subsequent appointment as she was approaching the 34th week of her pregnancy, Ms. Underwood said, her GP confirmed that she was indeed suffering with pre-eclampsia.
A similar scenario unfolded once more, when Ms. Underwood, as she described, attended hospital only to not be seen by her consultant and to be once again discharged.
“They told me that I was fine… I had actually questioned one of the midwives then… and she said ‘no, no you don’t have pre-eclampsia’.”
That evening, she said, her GP phoned and was aghast to hear Ms. Underwood had once again been discharged.
“He said to me, Mignon, if you need to go in ten times this weekend then that’s what you do,” she said of their conversation.
Continuing to feel unwell the following day, Ms. Underwood decided to attend hospital.
Once more, she said, she was sent home without the consultant having come to see her.
At her next appointment with her consultant, she said, “I was questioning him… he stood and he took his jacket like this and he said ‘you do not have pre-eclampsia’, he really raised his voice at me.
“It really alarmed us that has was so adamant and so sort of aggressive.
“He said to me, you have a nephrotic episode… then he started explaining about your kidneys malfunctioning… which is what happens when you have pre-eclampsia,” she said.
Recounting his experience of the time, Mr. Underwood said, “in the situation you tend to put your trust in them [consultants] because they are at the top of the medical food chain.
“They are supposed to know what they are talking about,” he said.
In the following days, Ms. Underwood spoke with a GP neighbour who prompted her to again attend her GP.
She described how, on that occasion, “he again said, without a doubt, ‘you have pre-eclampsia. I’m admitting you back into the hospital.’
On that particular visit to the hospital, Ms. Underwood was admitted.
As she described, she was by then experiencing severe swelling, extremely high blood pressure and other symptoms.
“It was like a scene from Fawlty Towers because they had the whole medical team, every junior doctor, everybody in, testing my eyes to explain why I had blurred vision, why I had headaches.”
From tests conducted on that occasion, Ms. Underwood concluded that the child in her womb had stopped growing.
Once again, she said, her consultant told her that she was having a difficult pregnancy and she was discharged.
He postponed her upcoming appointment to the following week, she said, thereby creating a gap of ten days when Ms. Underwood went without observation.
“I had numerous panic attacks in those ten days because the anxiety was so much because I knew that I had pre-eclampsia but my consultant, God himself, was telling me ‘no you’re fine’.”
“The whole time I was thinking… from what I knew, that they would have to deliver Conor, because that’s what happens.
“Either baby dies, mum dies or they both die.
“Your rational mind is sort of constantly overriding your intuition, thinking ‘you know what, they won’t let it go that far. That’s the worst case scenario but sure that’ll never happen, you know, you’re in good care.’
“But I wasn’t, I wasn’t.
“After the ten days, I was due for a scan again and that morning there was no heartbeat.
“He died that morning. It was actually Luke’s second birthday that day, the 24th of September.
Ms. Underwood sued the HSE for the distress she had endured and, after a four-year process, received an apology read out in the High Court in December.
However, she said, the apology, to her, “came as empty words.
“Unless they can actually demonstrate to us and show us clearly the meetings that they had, the procedures they put in place to ensure that this will not happen to somebody else…
“That is why we decided to take the case and to speak up, to hopefully ensure that not one other family goes through what we have lived through”
Referencing how the Underwood family are spurned on by a desire to make a difference and help save others from future trauma, Ms. Lynch said “in order for there to be a difference there has to be an investigation.
“I want to know… was there a formal investigation? Was there an internal inquiry? Was there an external inquiry? Has the HSE published these things? Can the public interrogate them?
“Because I think this is a matter in the public interest.
“The public need to feel reassured that what happened to you is not going to happen to anybody else in Wexford… and now, unless we have a reassurance and a guarantee, we’re still waiting,” she said.
Mr. Underwood outlined how he had recently written to the hospital manager, who signed the HSE’s letter of apology, asking similar questions.
“What lessons had been learnt? Did they have any investigation? Could we have a copy of the minutes of the meetings, anything to do with the death of our son?
“Had the consultant involved been censured? Sent for retraining? Dismissed? Any detail that they had,” he said.
Anyone who may have an issue or concern associated with maternity care can make contact with AIMS Ireland via their website at aimsireland.ie.
Read more in the Wexford Echo.