34-year-old Yulia Selina, from Saint Petersburg, Russia, is a young but already experienced mom, who patiently awaits the birth of her second baby. At precisely the 9 month mark, little Dima made his appearance and completed the small, happy family.
Yulia wanted a natural delivery, and at first it seemed that all was going well. After realizing that baby Dima was in a complicated position in the womb however, doctors decided on a caesarean section. To protect her baby, the young mother agreed. Little did she know that this decision would nearly cost her her own life.
Dima was born strong and healthy but soon after the birth Yulia began to feel worse and worse. "My belly started to swell. It even grew bigger than it was when I was 9 months pregnant. Every movement caused me horrible pain. At first, I thought it was just a natural reaction to the operation,” said Yulia, “but then I couldn't even sit up anymore. The pain would make me scream." The situation became critical, but doctors kept on insisting that it was a normal reaction to the C-section and dismissed her complaints.
Yulia was in excruciating pain and developed a fever. Finally, she came to the conclusion that she would have to do something about it herself. “I understood that, if I waited any longer for the doctors to help me, my children would be left without a mother," she remembers. After 24 days of agony and a lot of insistence on her part, Yulia was finally admitted to a different hospital. The first ultrasound revealed a huge amount of liquid in her belly and…a foreign object!
Yulia is rushed into an operating room and, 5 hours later, surgeons remove over 2.5 liters of pus from her abdomen and… an operating room sheet! It had been left inside her body after Dima’s birth. The nurses were so shocked they captured the moment with their cell phone cameras.
After she woke up from her life-saving surgery and saw the pictures, Yulia was in a state of shock. The young wife, and mother of two, knows that she survived by a miracle. She was appalled at the irresponsibility of the doctors to whom she had entrusted her own and her baby’s lives.
Despite the absurdity of the situation, Yulia still wants to forgive the professionals who did this to her: "I’m trying, I want to forgive and excuse those who did this to me, but then I think about how my family could have lost me forever. I would like to settle this in a civilized way,” she says. Experienced lawyers are helping Yulia and her family to file a law suit against the hospital to prevent this from happening to anybody else. The young mother believes that everything will now be fine, because she and her children are alive and healthy. And that's what's important.
Yulia’s story both amazes and outrages anyone who reads it. For Yulia and her family it all ended well, but it could have gone very differently.
Sadly, her case is not the only one. If you have also been touched or outraged by this case of blatant irresponsibility, which could have cost this young woman’s life, then share this story with everyone you know. Let us make sure that such a joyous occasion does not turn into a horrible nightmare for any women out there.
