The milk that leaks from Mantwa Mokoena’s breast is a sad and constant reminder of what could have been.
On Wednesday, Sibusiso, her only child, died at Mafube Hospital in Frankfort, Free State. He was 20 days old.
Sibusiso, whose name means “a blessing” in Zulu, had encephalocele, which meant his neural tube failed to close completely during foetal development and his brain grew outside his head and in a sac.
According to his paediatrician, the brain was abnormal and the only thing keeping him alive was a brain stem that helped him to breathe.
He was being fed the milk his mother was expressing, through a feeding tube.
Until last week, he had been at Boitumelo Hospital in Kroonstad until management decided to move mother and baby to Mafube Hospital on Tuesday to be closer to their Tweeling home.
There Sibusiso continued receiving palliative care as there was nothing curative they could do for him any more.
Speaking to The Star on Sunday, Mokoena said that on Wednesday she was busy expressing milk for Sibusiso when a member of the nursing staff asked her to turn him. When she arrived at his bed, she found him foaming from the mouth and nose. He was also crying.
She wiped him and later fed him.
“He was quiet when I fed him but he took the milk. I left him after feeding him. After a while I went to check on him and found that he had vomited. I called the doctors and nurses, who rushed in with an oxygen machine.
“After a while I realised that he was not breathing while they were still working on him. They then suggested to take him to another ward, but they had not been there for five minutes when they called me and told me that he had died,” the 25-year-old woman said.
While Mokoena and her boyfriend had been told that baby Sibusiso may die at any time, they clung to the hope that someone might do something and help him. “It was not yet his time to go,” she said. Sibusiso was buried on Saturday in QwaQwa.
His birth and subsequent death has left Mokoena afraid of experiencing motherhood again.
“I don’t want another child as I am scared that he or she might be born with the same defect. It was not easy for me seeing my baby like that,” she said.
The Star