The Experience of Losing a Baby

by Theodora Mays/PNN

As my blurred eyes opened, my head feeling woozy from the anesthesia, I focused on a red-faced doctor whose eyes were filled with tears. He started talking to me, something about the baby's heart rate dropping and a machine for 3 hours. My thoughts slowly started coming back to me and I remembered being rushed into a room and a big plastic object being placed over my nose. The tragic loss of my baby on that night, so many years ago, rushed back to me as I heard about the possible loss of St. Luke's Hospital in San Francisco.

For the last 130 years St. Luke's Hospital, located in SOMA, has provided medical care to poor people and people of color. The hospital's closure is part of the recent string of attacks on poor communities from rich investors, where corporations move services from poor, underserved communities, to richer white areas of the city.

The California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) plans on "replacing" St Luke's with a series of ambulatory care centers in the south of Market area. These centers would be in Stonestown, Potrero Hill and the Excelsior districts and will not eliminate the need for an impatient hospital nor will they be directly accessible to St. Luke's most needy patients. St. Luke's is the only private hospital South of Market and the only other accessible hospital is San Francisco General Hospital, which is already overburdened.

If St. Luke's closes one half of San Francisco will be left with only one hospital, San Francisco General. It is not easy to get from South of Market to North of Market. Can you imagine having a heart attack in Bayview/ Hunters’s Point or the Excelsior District and trying to get across town in rush hour traffic, especially if San Francisco General is not accepting ambulances?

Last year, St. Luke's emergency room served 28,000 people and 7,000 of these visits were critical. San Francisco General Hospital cannot handle this number of additional visits

"You cannot have an emergency room without intensive care facilities or an operating room. All that is there is a shell intended to deceive the public into believing that an Emergency Room remains," said Bonnie Castillo, RN, and Director of the California Nurses Association, Sutter Division. Sutter, whose headquarters are in Sacramento, is the umbrella corporation that runs all the big hospitals in San Francisco, as well as the rest of the state.

Bonnie Castillo further proclaimed, "We will challenge Sutter with every means we can to preserve this critically needed hospital and Emergency Care Services at St. Luke's."

Hearing about the challenge to save St. Luke's, my mind kept wandering back to that night. To the blurred faces of my doctor and husband and the sounds of their muffled voices that seemed to keep saying something about "3 hours on a machine." I struggled to mumble to my husband for him to call our Bishop, thinking we had 3 hours to reach out to him for prayer. Then I was jarred with the realization that the 3 hours had already passed and our baby was dead.

Had there not been a hospital accessible to me when I went into labor the end could have been far more tragic, both my baby and I could be dead. I kept thinking about this when I heard of the mothers and children leading a Candlelight Vigil marking the closure of the key pediatric unit at St. Luke's Hospital on February 13th. Many families and women with high-risk pregnancies will be deeply affected by this closure.

Jane Sandoval, an RN at St. Luke's agrees, “Sutter is degrading patient care by closing unit after unit at St. Luke's. Do they expect women with high-risk pregnancies to take a cross-town bus? They are abandoning the families who depend on this hospital."

During the past two years, the CPMC has already closed or is "about to close" several services including the Psychiatric Inpatient Unit, Occupational and Physical Therapy, the Workers Compensation Unit and the Neonatal Intensive Care and Pediatric Floor.

Imagining the crowds of women gathering at Valencia and Cesar Chavez with burning candles and remembering my own experience of losing a child, I know that we have to save these hospitals. We must keep St. Luke's alive.