According to a lawsuit filed by the parents, the baby became stuck during labor and the doctor began pulling.
What the flying fuck
It’s like something out of some sick comedy sketch. Except with actual human suffering.
Officials with Southern Regional Medical Center issued a statement saying that “this unfortunate infant death occurred in utero prior to the delivery and decapitation,” and said that the doctor who delivered the baby, Tracy St. Julian is not “and never has been” an employee of the hospital.
I wish it was.
it’s common for doctors in private practice to have privileges at local hospitals to practice, see patients, perform procedures, surgeries, etc.
part of that doctor’s service fee is paid to the hospital for this privilege.
I love that they are going with the “it’s not the OB’s fault and even if it were, they don’t work for us.” That guide is actually worse than if they just denied it was their fault. What they admitted is that they admitted a woman who was in labor and did not assign a doctor to her but instead let a random woman help deliver and decapitate the baby. That is a systemic issue and clearly the people managing the hospital should be named from operating any hospital ever again.
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I can’t think of a more appropriate response.
Keep in mind that decapitation doesn’t mean the head was removed from the body.
The article indicates that it was full separation
The lawsuit claims doctors “pulled on the baby’s head and neck so hard and manipulated them so hard, that the bones in the baby’s skull, head and neck were broken.”
…
According to the medical examiner’s report, the baby’s death was caused by the “fracture-dislocation” of his upper cervical spine and spinal cord.
It most certainly does not.
Wait… What? I swear the article previously said the torso was removed via c section and the head vaginally… I’m confused.
Edit: I forgot I read it in the article linked in this thread by @[email protected] instead of the OP article.
In this case, it was: “According to the complaint, the baby’s legs and torso were delivered through the C-section incision without the head. The baby’s head was then delivered vaginally.”
Well that’s the most traumatic thing I’ve read today.
Yes, it actually by definition does. An internal decapitation doesn’t mean the head was removed, but a decapitation does mean the head was removed from the body. That’s how the terminology works.
The two are often used interchangeably by journalists, which is why the reminder is necessary.
According to the linked article (which is not a good article) it was internal decapitation, although another source says it was a complete separation.
Surgical tech here. Can’t really comment on the clinical justification for what’s going on here cuz 1) I’m just a tech; and 2) I wasn’t there; but I’ve done a metric fuck-ton of c-sections, so figured I’d chime in with some behind-the-scenes insight. C-sections can be brutal as hell. Never been in on a vaginal delivery, cuz that’s not OR territory, but c-sections are the kind of case you’re on high alert for the entire time cuz shit can go south really fast for both mother and baby. The amount of force I’ve seen (and contributed to) applied to get a baby out could definitely be in dismemberment territory if there was some defect at play that could make the bones/muscles weaker than normal… article doesn’t say anything about that being the case, but point is that we tend to think of handling babies as being an exceptionally gentle process, and that is 100% not the case when it comes to getting them out of the mother.
Some of the most horrific things I’ve seen in the OR have been in the c-section room. But they’re the kind of thing that if you don’t do, it’s basically a death sentence for the mom or the baby… like, do you leave a baby stuck in the birth canal with its umbilical cord wrapped around its neck; or do you pull a little harder to get it out? You’re weighing certain death against possible death, but the latter being an exceptionally shocking worse-case scenario.
Can’t emphasize enough: wasn’t there, can’t justify squat, but I have been in situations where the the surgeon weighed a risk like that, and the only reason you didn’t read about that case in the news was that the risk paid off and we got the desired outcome. Luck.
The ruling on this one of homicide as opposed to murder or even involuntary manslaughter is a point of interest. Homicide is the killing of another human, but isn’t typically a charge in and of itself… illegal and intentional homicide is murder; legal and justifiable homicide could be something like self defense… but just “homicide” only tells us that the baby was killed, and yeah no shit.
Anyway, based on my own experience, I’d give the doc and delivery team the benefit of the doubt in terms of the operation: extreme circumstances can call for an extreme response, and when that doesn’t work, the result is also extreme. This is a case that will haunt the staff involved all the way to the grave - really hope the hospital hooks them all up with top-notch therapy after that shit. The absence of murder/manslaughter charge leads me to believe their investigation found some merit in the doc’s decision to pull extra hard.
Thad said, state law is a weird animal, so “homicide” in Georgia legally speaking could be equatable to “murder” everywhere else. /shrug.
But even assuming the best-case-scenario clinically, the lack of transparency after the fact though is 100% inexcusable, but also unsurprising coming from a private hospital. Their decisions are driven by money and PR. Ethics are a tie breaker at best.
The bit that makes me not want to give the benefit of the doubt is the fact that they had lost fetal heart tones an hour before going to C-section. For a delivery like this with a couple known complications going into it, the threshold to go to the OR should be much lower. Also, as barbaric as it is, something like an episiotomy could have averted this death.
An episiotomy is a cut (incision) made in the tissue between the vaginal opening and the anus during childbirth. This area is called the perineum. Although an episiotomy was once a routine part of childbirth, that’s no longer the case.
Wow
Like I said, it’s kind of barbaric, but it can be used as an intermediate measure if there’s something like shoulder dystocia but the mother is against or hesitant about going to C-Section. These days, the episiotomy incision is made at a very specific angle so as to preserve function of the pelvic floor muscles, and it can also be used as an intervention or prophylaxis against perineal tearing which is more likely to damage the pelvic floor muscles and lead to complications.
LOL, wait till you see your wife get cut in real time. Jesus. All I saw was a flash of steel.
“Uh, what was that? Oh hell no…”
At least asking the husband if he wants the doctor to “tighten her up a bit” by stitching the perineum up further than nomal has fallen out of fashion.
C-sections can be done to recover the corpse of a fetus. It’s not common - I’ve only seen it once, it was easily the single most fucked up thing I’ve witnessed. An hour isn’t an unreasonable amount of time to staff and setup a c-section. It’s not a STAT, for sure, but with the fetus already dead, the only urgency would be on behalf of the mother, so if her life wasn’t in danger at that time, things were likely slowing back down at that point.
I’m saying that they should have gone to C-Section or episiotomy long before it got to that point. This was already known to be a higher risk delivery, and the first sign of shoulder dystocia or other complication should have been the time to elevate the level of care…not several hours later.
I don’t have the expertise or experience to comment on what they should have done - 100% of my experience with OB is c-sections; I’ve just seen how shit can go from bad to haunt-you-for-the-rest-of-your-life in less time than it takes to process and act on wtf just happened in that room.
Sounds like you do have that experience/expertise, so I’ll take what you’re saying at face value; my only goal here was to caution folks against going straight for the torches and pitchforks considering the high likelyhood of contributing factors that either weren’t reported or are outside of our normal scope of thinking.
“Officials… said that the doctor who delivered the baby, Tracy St. Julian is not “and never has been” an employee of the hospital.”
How does that work?
A doctor can have practice rights at a hospital but not work for the hospital. So the OBGYN can deliver babies and do C-sections and such but isn’t an employee of the hospital.
And that’s enough for the hospital to think they’re not responsible for what they do in their building?
No they are just trying to draw a definitive line between the two entities. Doctors private practice vs the hospital. Probably for legal reasons but mostly for PR reasons. You know so they can argue that there was nothing to indicate Dr. Bebe Decapitator would decapitate a baby prior to actually doing so and that the doctor was very much a really real doctor that knew medical stuff so please don’t make us pay lotses of money for the doctor doing a naughty.
It’s a way to make it sound like it wasn’t their fault for hiring bad doctors
Doctors can have the right to practice medicine in multiple hospitals. That does not make those doctors employees.
Bullshit. I don’t care what the legal definition of employee is, who authorized the doctor to work there? That’s right, the hospital did. If the hospital doesn’t want their reputation tied to shitty doctors, then don’t let shitty doctors into your hospital.
If I know my movies and TV shows, you go into the locker room and steal someone’s lab coat and everyone thinks you belong.
I concur. Do you concur?
Gah, I should have concurred!
Or your boss invites your estranged wife to just work there without telling anyone she’s coming. Oh and then you hire the guy she slept with. And everyone is fucking everyone all the time. Including patients.
I swear, if Seattle Grace had an HR department they’re probably all alcoholics.
Doctors sometimes work as contractors for different hospitals.
In my area, I don’t think any doctors are employees of the hospital. The way it was explained to me was that it’s not allowed.
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I hate to be the bearer of bad news…but it was a complete decapitation. The torso and limbs were delivered via delayed C-section and the head was delivered vaginally. This article has the medical examiner’s release including the description of the head being detached.
From the article linked in the OP:
“When they wrapped the baby up tightly, they propped the baby’s head on top of the blanket to make it appear like the head was attached when it wasn’t,” attorney Dr. Roderick Edmond said.
Definitely doesn’t sound like an “internal decapitation” to me. What a strange thing to lie about.
I don’t think it was a lie, per se. Probably just a misinterpretation or misunderstanding.
Possible, but given the unwarranted confidence in the earlier comments and the “Couldn’t give a shit” in response to being shown to be inaccurate, I’m not inclined to give the user in question the benefit of the doubt.
Yeah, I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but a peek at the modlog entries for that user leads me to believe that they just made assumptions and didn’t care to check that they were correct before commenting.
I knew I had read somewhere before that the baby was physically decapitated; thank you for the link.
Thanks for that very relevant info, MedicPigBabySaver.
Yw. Click bait makes me nauseous.
You spread misinformation
Good thing you checked your sources.
Meh, made more sense that it was an internal decapitation. Couldn’t give a shit.
But it wasn’t internal. It was a full decapitation. NOW, when you’re wrong and it’s not “clickbait,” you “couldn’t give a shit.”
No it didn’t, given the wording used.
Yeah but that doesn’t get as many clicks
Yah, I’m aware. 🙄
Oh thank goodness. I feel so much better about it now. /s
Ok, so from the article, the doctor attempted to puke that baby out and decapitated in the process. They had to do a c section to get the body out separately. The doctor then just tells the parents the baby died, not how it died. The parents find out at the nursing home the baby was decapitated.
So they hire a pathologist to do a post mortem analysis on the body and the pathologist POSTS GRAPHIC PHOTOS OF THE BODY ON HIS INSTAGRAM.
the doctor attempted to puke that baby out
Well that’s… quite the visual.
The previous article about the story that this one links to says the doctor not only lied, they also tried to cover it up by wrapping the baby up so tightly the parents couldn’t tell its head wasn’t attacked, and saying they couldn’t get the free autopsy they were eligible for and that they should cremate the body. Wtf.
Are you unfamiliar with human anatomy, or just an edgelord?
Edit: copy edgelord
That make you a pizza cutter then, boss? All edge and no point?
Nope I’m out.
Noah, get the boat.
Jesus Christ.
I didn’t even know that was possible. Are they really that delicate that you can decapitate them just by pulling? That’s horrifying.
Based on the article the doctor spent hours pulling and contorting the baby’s head. So, Im guessing that no it’s not something you can do just by pulling i.e. something went very wrong here, hence an investigation and possibly criminal charges in the near future.
