Everleigh Victoria McCarthy was born three months premature at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and weighed a little over two pounds. Her brain developed massive bleeding shortly after her July 25, 2020 birth.
Her parents, Alana and Daniel McCarthy, remained hopeful that she would be able bring her home. They held her, read her “Little Red Riding Hood,” and told her they loved her.
Everleigh was only 2 weeks old on Aug. 6. Doctors told the couple that Everleigh would not survive. Ms. Ross held the baby and watched the heart monitor fall flatline while she removed her from the ventilator.
The nurses gently cleaned Everleigh’s body and dressed her in a white satin gown. The unimaginable task of planning a memorial for their firstborn child began for her parents.
But when the funeral home tried to retrieve Everleigh’s body four days later, hospital employees said that they could not find her remains, according to a police report.
The Boston police determined that the baby’s body “was probably mistaken as soiled linen” and discarded, officers wrote in the report.
When the funeral home called the couple to tell them their child’s body had been lost, a new wave of grief hit them.
“It’s like she died all over again,” Ms. Ross said.
Ms. Ross filed a lawsuit against the hospital in Suffolk County Superior Court, Boston on Thursday. They are not seeking a specific monetary amount, said Greg Henning, one of the couple’s lawyers. The goal, the couple said, was to prevent the hospital from losing the body of someone else’s child.
“We don’t want anybody else to go through this,” Ms. Ross, 37, said. “We want the hospital to be held accountable. We want them to fix this.”
In a statement on Thursday, Dr. Sunil Eappen, Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s chief medical officer, expressed “our deepest sympathies and most sincere apologies to the Ross and McCarthy family for their loss and the heartbreaking circumstances surrounding it.”
“As with any instance in which there is a concern raised related to our standard of care or practice,” he said, “we readily and transparently shared the details with the patient’s family. We always assess both system and human factors that may contribute to errors or potential issues raised from patients, family members, or staff. If necessary, we take action. Due to pending litigation, we are unable to comment specifically on this case.”
A lawyer representing the hospital did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
Although it seems impossible to imagine a hospital dumping a child’s body, it does happen. A woman sued a Minnesota hospital after she lost her stillborn baby. Her remains were found in a bag of laundry detergent two weeks later. Police searched garbage dumps in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Pennsylvania after a family who lost their baby 20 minutes after it was born claimed that the hospital had accidentally disposed of the body.
“We don’t know the answer to how often it happens,” Mr. Henning said. “Many times the institutions that are losing an infant or losing a body realize what extraordinarily terrible type of conduct it is.”
He added, “And they have a desire to resolve the matter before it becomes a public issue.”
In the Boston case, relatives of Ms. Ross and Mr. McCarthy called the police a day after the couple were told that Everleigh’s remains were missing.
Detectives interviewed a hospital pathologist who initially told them that only pathologists were allowed inside the examination room in the hospital’s morgue and that no soiled linens had been removed the day after Everleigh’s body was brought there.
The police report stated that the pathologist later admitted to seeing linens on a stainless metal tray and had disposed of them in a bag intended for soiled material.
Police discovered that linens are transported to a cleaning company with an on-site compressor. The waste management company then sends hospital waste to landfills in South Carolina or New Hampshire or incinerates it at another facility.
Officers and employees searched a waste center in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood center twice, scouring for hours through hospital gowns, blood-soaked clothes and rags, and dirty linens and towels. According to the police report, they did not find the body.
The police determined that Everleigh’s body had not been put in the “proper area where deceased children” are supposed to be placed in the morgue cooler, the report said. According to the lawsuit, it is most likely that her remains were sent to one of the landfills.
The police also noted that one of the nurses who had brought Everleigh’s body to the morgue had not returned calls from the hospital, which was doing its own investigation. The hospital also failed to give detectives a “complete video” that showed what happened between the time the baby’s body was brought to the morgue and the time hospital employees realized that her remains were missing.
Ms. Ross and Mr. McCarthy, who had planned to bury Everleigh in a family plot, said they were still in disbelief that their daughter’s body is gone.
“Having accepted the fact that she was going to pass away was one thing,” Mr. McCarthy, 38, said. “I never thought that I would have to accept the fact that I would have to go to bed every night not knowing where she is.”
Ms. Ross, a medical writer, and Mr. McCarthy (a general manager at a frozen pizza company), met in fifth grade. They grew up in Boston’s Hyde Park neighborhood where they played freeze tag and basketball during recess.
They remained close friends throughout the years, but they did not fall for each other until their 20s.
“We knew what we didn’t want,” Mr. McCarthy said. “We saw a lot of what we did want in each other.”
They moved in with each other in 2008. They decided to start their own family ten years later.
Although the first two pregnancies were unsuccessful, they were optimistic when Ms. Ross was pregnant with Everleigh. Everleigh is a lively, energetic baby.
Ms. Ross found out that her cervix was reducing during the second trimester. She was at risk of having an early birth. She was put on partial bed rest, but on July 23, 2020, she felt her water break and the couple rushed to Brigham and Women’s, a 180-year-old institution that bills itself as “the most trusted name in women’s health.”
All Ms. Ross and Mr. McCarthy have left of Everleigh are photographs, a few mementos and a memory box that the hospital nurses put together that includes the water that Everleigh’s grandmothers, who are Catholic, used to baptize her in her final moments.
Therapy has been a part of their lives. They are determined for another child.
“We’re still trying to move forward and eventually have a family,” Mr. McCarthy said. “Right now, we’re fighting this and telling Everleigh’s story because she’s not here to tell it.”
Source: NY Times
