A mother of seven broke down in the High Court yesterday as she told of her shock at learning, just weeks after she underwent a sterilisation operation, that she was pregnant. When she found out a year later that she was pregnant again, she thought her doctor "got a bigger shock than I did", Bridget Byrne said.
Ms Byrne said she underwent the sterilisation procedure in December 1999 and found out in March 2000 she was pregnant.when, after she was admitted to a hospital accident and emergency unit with abdominal pain, a doctor at the hospital asked how her baby was. Another pregnancy was detected in April 2001.
Ms Byrne and her now estranged husband Daniel are seeking damages after she gave birth to two children in the two years immediately after the sterilisation at the Coombe hospital in Dublin on December 16th, 1999.
The proceedings have been brought in two actions, by Ms Byrne, Kilcullen, Co Kildare, and by her husband. These are the first cases here where the substantial cost is sought of rearing to adulthood children born after sterilisations. The couple claim they should receive the same costs as would be incurred if the two children were raised in foster care.
The Coombe has denied negligence and also argues it would be contrary to public policy to award the costs of rearing children born following sterilisation procedures. It also rejects the basis on which the child-rearing costs are calculated.
The action is being heard by Mr Justice Peter Kelly and is expected to last several days.
Ms Byrne said yesterday she was married at 17 years of age and had five children before she was 26. Her oldest child was now 27.
She had thought about sterilisation in 1991 after an ectopic pregnancy but she was young and healthy and was advised against it.
During the 1990s, she and her husband were rearing their five children in a three-bedroom house and "were doing okay".
She was referred to the Coombe by her GP in January 1999 and, after a meeting there, signed a form agreeing to sterilisation and the implications of it. She had the operation on December 16th, 1999 and was told afterwards by nurses that the surgeon was happy with it.
Before the operation, she was not asked if she was pregnant or asked to undergo a pregnancy test, she said. She suffered abdominal pain in the new year which became very bad in March. She could not sit or stand. She went to the A&E at Naas hospital where a doctor came to her after a urine sample was taken and asked her how old her baby was.
In tears, she said: "I said to him he had the wrong chart. I could not be pregnant. I kept saying I could not be pregnant. I had my tubes tied the few weeks before."
When she went for a scan later in the Coombe, she said she was told the clamps on her fallopian tubes were secure. She had lower abdominal pain throughout the pregnancy and sometimes could not walk or sit down. She was on crutches for six weeks before her daughter was born.
In April 2001, she said she started to feel familiar pains in the bottom of her stomach and her GP did a pregnancy test.
"I think he got a bigger shock than I did. I was pregnant again. " Asked how she felt about the second pregnancy, she said she thought: "Oh God, no way".