Woman Forced to Recover in Maternity Ward After Emergency Hysterectomy
Hospitals have a limited amount of space, and sometimes waiting conditions are not ideal. But one woman in the U.K. who suffered a devastating and traumatic emergency hysterectomy says she’d really have preferred not to have to wait for her doctor’s appointments with all the healthy pregnant ladies sharing ultrasound pictures in the hospital’s women’s health ward.
Kathryn Jago says she’s been writing to the hospital suggesting changes in the layout of the women’s ward at Singleton Hospital in Swansea, because the maternity ward and antenatal care and gynecology units are all in the same place in the hospital’s Women’s Health Unit, and that having to share that waiting area is really difficult for women suffering infertility or pregnancy loss.
Jago told the Daily Mail that she is a neonatal nurse and had always wanted to have children someday, but those dreams were cut short one day when she suddenly collapsed at home and had to be rushed to the hospital for profuse bleeding because a fibroid tumor in her uterus had suddenly exploded. Jago had to have an emergency hysterectomy to save her life, and she spent three weeks recovering at the hospital. Since then she’s had to have regular gynecological appointments at that hospital, and she says that having to sit across from all the happy pregnant women is really difficult for her, and presumably for a lot of women like her.
“It struck me how unfair it was that one side of the corridor you have pregnant women going for check-ups, then on the opposite side you have women like myself who have suffered miscarriages and hysterectomies,” she said. “I believe there needs to be a massive change and that the hospital needs to be more sensitive with the layout to the gynecology unit.”
The hospital is sympathetic to Jago’s point and seems to realize that it is extremely difficult to be putting the women waiting for prenatal appointments right next to the women who have experienced pregnancy loss or severe fertility problems.
“Ideally, we would like to have separate rooms for patients to wait in, and if there is an opportunity to making changes to the unit this is something we would do,” the hospital said in a statement. In the meantime, the hospital says it will try to flag patient appointments and let patients know that they can make other waiting arrangements if they find the main waiting room in the Women’s Health Unit too difficult.
It sounds like Jago has actually done really good work in bringing this issue to the hospital’s attention, but this is something one would think hospitals would already be aware of and sensitive to. Especially since numerous commenters on The Daily Mail’s site have been sharing similar stories of having to go through pregnancy loss, stillbirth, and fertility struggles right next to all the babies and pregnant women. That just makes an already difficult experience much more painful.
