Young mama ‘willing to help’ but…

At three months old, baby Blaire is a pink-cheeked, healthy girl who makes her family smile.

Dressed in pink and white pajamas, the infant sat in her stroller yesterday quietly drinking from a milk bottle held by her 22-year-old mother.

“She doesn’t cry a lot at home,” said the mother Lyka, who remembers how the baby wailed inside the nursery of the Cebu Puericulture Center and Maternity House last February a few days after she was born on Feb. 22.

Lyka showed a smooth, hairless strip of skin on the baby’s cheeks.
That’s where the adhesive tape, which held a pacifier, was pulled off by a nurse, at least two times, she said. The hair hasn’t grown back.

Photos of baby Blaire’s taped face posted by the mother on Facebook have made the infant the second public example of alleged child abuse in the Cebu private hospital since parents of baby Yohannes went public on social media on May 9.

Lyka allowed TV news stations and Cebu Daily News yesterday to view the two-minute video she took with her camera-phone of her child sleeping in a hospital crib with a pacifier taped to her mouth at 10 p.m. of Feb. 26 (not Feb. 24 as reported earlier).

The cries of other babies can be heard in the background, but the camera is focused only on the newborn baby Blaire.

The mother said she is willing to give a copy of the video to support a formal complaint of couple Ryan Noval and Jasmine, parents of the first “taped baby”.

“There is no problem in giving the photo and video but I still have to decide with my partner if I would speak before the inter-agency panel,” she told Cebu Daily News.

Both parents of baby Blaire are on leave as university students and plan to marry later.

Lyka repeated her request to the media to keep her full name out of news stories and to blur photos of her child. She said her father’s job in a company related to the hospital may be affected by the controversy.

Noval contacted her online, asking her permission to show a copy of the baby’s photo to the investigating panel.: “Please help all the babies/families become aware of their practice.”

“No problem. I am willing to help:)” Lyka replied on line.

But the decision to get more involved is something not everyone in the family agrees on. Her partner and his mother are reluctant to get in the limelight of a hospital controversy.

“I have nothing against the nurses and the hospital,” Lyka said.

“I just want to know why the hospital keeps denying its own practice.”

The young mother said she discovered her baby was taped in the mouth on Feb. 24. when she went to the nursery to breastfeed.

When she asked the nurse why, “their reason was to silence the baby because she kept crying.”
At her request, the nurse removed the tape but the strip was pulled off without being softened first with water or oil.

“My baby was crying hard. She was jolted when the tape was pulled off.
I just comforted her so she would go back to sleep.”

Lyka said she didn’t complain because she saw two to three babies who were taped with blue pacifiers as well, and thought it was the normal practice.

The baby was later taken out of the nursery for an X-ray, with the plaster removed from her face.
Lyka and other family members saw the red, inflamed skin – her partner and her partner’s 49-year old mother outside the nursery.

“I wanted to take a photo of the child because her cheeks were so red because the plaster was recently pulled off. When I took a picture, a nurse told me that it wasn’t allowed,” said the 49-year-old grandmother.

But the grandmother used her black android cellphone to take a shot, which she showed to CDN yesterday.

“It took a long time for the redness in her face to fade. It looked like the baby had rashes because of the irritation,” she said.

Lyka said there was no written order from her doctor for the use of a pacifier.

“I just took the video as a remembrance of my baby staying inside the nursery room. I did not expect that a pacifier was not allowed,” said Lyka.

She said remembers asking the attending nurse Arianne Mae Pacula to remove the tape of her baby.

“Let me be clear. Pacula pulled off the tape from my baby the second time I saw it there but she wasn’t the one who applied the plaster and pacifier,” said the mother.

Lawyer Dante Jadman of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR-7) said the discovery of the new case could support a complaint.

“I encourage her. If she wants to pursue and file case then she can make a formal complaint and if not then we can’t also force her because it is her right,” Jadman said.

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