My wife just had our 4th child who was born on Aug 6th. She was required to have a cesarean because of our 2nd child who was breach. The doctor during the second child’s delivery had to cut horizontal and vertical to get our son out. Because of this, my wife was told that cesarean’s would be inevitable here on out.
During this last delivery, my wife was admitted on a scheduled delivery, and we arrived 30 min early to make sure everything was in order. The delivery went well and my daughter was extremely healthy and beautiful.
The post partum care was disastrous. Blowing out 5 veins pre delivery to insert an IV was the start of our luck. The area in which my wife was moved to post delivery was not a post partum section of a hospital, which was a bad situation because none of the nurses were trained to treat this type of care. The nurses kept apologizing for the lack of knowledge in this care.
My wife’s room was in an area that faced a waiting room in which the chairs pointed directly into our room. There were countless times that men were sitting on these benches when the door was opened allowing them a view that was extremely inappropriate. My wife asked multiple times to have the benches rotated towards the window, however it never yielded results. The violation my wife felt was tremendous.
However, the worst part of this experience was on Aug. 23rd. That morning about 3:30am in the morning, less than two weeks from being home, my wife was running temperatures upwards towards 103.5. We called the OB office line and spoke to the off hour answering service. The OB doctor called back and I told him that my wife was having a hard time breathing and her temp was over 103 degrees. He said go to the hospital and get blood work done.
I packed up my wife and took her to the hospital. At the ER, they found my wife’s heart rate at 135 and the blood pressure was 68 over 40. The ER nurse admitted my wife right away. After a cat scan and chest x-ray, which required iodine and no more feeding our new born, the chest doctor let my wife know that she had a serious case of pneumonia. After a few interview questions, the doctor determined that because there were no breathing exercises and no plastic breathing apparatus administer in post partum, the pneumonia was more than likely contracted in the hospital from stagnant lung fluid. He stated that he would need to “throw the kitchen sink at her” with meds to get this infection under control. During this time she would not be able to nurse her newborn but the hospital would provide a pump to help keep the milk flowing. However, each time a new nurse came into the room while my wife was pumping, they asked if they could help preserve the milk pumped, not knowing the extent of danger giving this milk to our newborn.
A few day later and another chest x-ray, the doctor stated that her lungs are not progressing as fast as he wanted. He stated to my wife to take it seriously because people die when pneumonia progresses to this state. On Aug. 26th, the doctor finally released my wife with strong prescriptions to help combat the infection in her lungs. She is still extremely exhausted, and short of breath working to recovery. While in the Hospital, her ability to produce milk dried up. This I know will effect our child in long term care and also has broken my wife’s heart as she wanted to spend this special time with her daughter.
This event in our lives has caused disorderly stress and loss of work, while putting my children under un-necessary separation from their parents.

I would like to know what can be done to prevent this from happening in the future, as hospitals will continue to get more busy every passing day, and reimburse us for loss work wages and hospital bills.

Thank you.