Babies cry. That is just a simple fact of nature. But one nurse didn’t like it when a 6-day-old baby in her care was crying, so she taped his mouth shut! The parents had thought their baby was “supposedly in ‘good hands’ of a professional establishment,” according the father’s Facebook page, but they were not prepared for what they found.
Little Yohannes Noval was born on May 3 at Cebu Maternity Hospital in the Philippines, and needed to remain in there for a few days due to an infection. His mother is breastfeeding him, and his parents visited him frequently during his hospital stay. When they came to visit him on Friday evening at 8 pm, they found their helpless little newborn with tape over his mouth.
When his mother Jasmine Badocdoc made the shocking discovery, she demanded to know why. According to ABS-CBN , the nurse who taped his mouth shut said that baby was crying non-stop and was too noisy. Nurseslabs adds that he “was always asking for milk.”
The nurse didn’t stop there with her bizarre treatment of her tiny patient. Badocdoc asked the nurse to remove the tape from her baby’s mouth, but the nurse refused. “You can go ahead and take it off yourself, ma’am.”
The mother was afraid that she would hurt the baby, because, face it, tape being peeled off of skin can certainly hurt. The nurse ultimately removed the tape, but in the process, she removed some skin from the baby’s lips. Needless to say, he cried again.
The nursing supervisor’s defense was hardly better. The tape was needed for Yohannes to “suck on his pacifier properly.”
“Was it really necessary to tape my son’s pacifier? What if he choked on it?” the mother demanded.
There was actually a very simple reason for the baby’s tears, one which allegedly no one bothered to check until the parents got there. The baby didn’t like the wet diaper, but the nurse failed to check for the simple explanation, instead resorting to the “inhumane and unprofessional” measure of putting sticky tape across the child’s tender little lips and face.
The baby’s father Ryan Noval took to Facebook to express his outrage over the treatment of their son.
“It was discovered by Jasmine that our baby had peed his diaper!!! Was there just NO TIME to check that [the diaper]? Do you just put tape over a baby’s mouth just because he’s too noisy? Did you take time to inspect and do your job properly? ARE YOU RESPECTABLE???”
The couple took pictures and reported the incident immediately to the information desk, where they were told to make sure to keep the photos. They have since filed a complaint against the hospital. The hospital reports that the complaint is being investigated.
“I feel raped as a parent,” Noval said in an interview. He posted that this is “probably not an isolated incident so we cannot really say your babies are safe at this establishment. What most people don’t see in the nursery room is very different from what’s actually happening behind closed doors. They handle your children there like puppies out of a dog pound.”
The late Dr. David Chamberlain wrote and spoke extensively about the impact that traumatic experiences , such as this, can have on newborns. As previously reported in The Inquisitr , medical practitioners often treat newborn babies as though their screams were simply reflexes, that “babies couldn’t possibly be having real experiences.” The belief was that they couldn’t really be experiencing pain or trauma. But Dr. Chamberlain found the early experiences in the womb and in the time surrounding birth often had profound, and sometimes traumatic, effects on the person, with lifelong implications. He said that the “experts” are ignorant about the baby , which can cause “layers of trauma.”
Somehow this nurse missed the commonly known fact that babies expect to be with their mamas, skin-to-skin preferably, and they tend to protest when that doesn’t happen. They cry. They wet their diapers. They get hungry. They want to be with their mommy. That is what they do. It’s how they are wired.
Taping a baby’s mouth is one of the most inappropriate actions that a nurse can possibly take. If the nurse cannot handle a baby crying, perhaps she should consider a different profession. What do you think?
[images via Facebook and bing]