'I held this baby in my hand and wept'

-- A mother says she was forced give birth to her still-born child over a toilet in a hotel room after she was turned away from the East Kootenay Regional Hospital because of a lack of beds.

Jennifer Norgate, a mother of three in Elkford, B.C., began her ordeal May 30 when she and her husband Carl travelled to a Calgary clinic for an ultrasound to determine the gender of their 18-week-old unborn baby.

"We were excited to find out if we were having a boy or a girl and to let our other three children know if they would have a brother or a sister," Norgate said in a letter sent to Premier Gordon Campbell, Health Minister George Abbott, local MLA Bill Bennett and others.

"Unfortunately, we found out that our baby had died approximately four weeks earlier. We were sent home to see our family doctor the next day."

Her doctor gave Norgate medication to induce labour and quickly arranged for the couple to see a gynecologist in Cranbrook, a two-and-a-half-hour drive away in southeastern B.C.

But when they got to Cranbrook, they were told there were no beds at the hospital. She was told she'd have to wait in the emergency room or go to a hotel.

Because the couple had no way of knowing how long it would take Norgate to deliver the fetus, they chose to go to a hotel and planned to return to the hospital when labour set in.

Norgate said in her letter she went into labour just before 3 a.m. on June 1 and delivered the dead fetus herself in the bathroom.

"I held this baby in my hand and wept as I didn't know what to do with this child," she wrote.

"I can't answer why our baby died. That I will know when I meet my maker. Can you, Mr. Bennett, answer why we had to be in a hotel room to deliver our baby?"

The next day, Norgate and her husband went back to the hospital with baby in hand.

They waited in the emergency room four hours for an ultrasound to determine if all the tissue was removed from Norgate's uterus.

It wasn't and she had to have medical intervention.

Again she was told she'd have to wait, possibly until 6 p.m. — 10 hours after the couple had arrived at the hospital — because the anesthesiologist had left the hospital.

However, staff managed to call another one in and the procedure was performed earlier in the afternoon.

Norgate had high praise for her doctor, the hospital staff and the anesthesiologist. But she was angry about the state of the health-care system. --