He came into the world as a surprise, born with his twin brother by the side of the road. Three days later he left the world...
|||Johannesburg - He came into the world as a surprise, born with his twin brother by the side of the road on Tuesday after the bus carrying his mother broke down in Benoni, Ekurhuleni.
Three days later he left the world, pronounced dead early on Friday morning from heavy bleeding in his lungs as a result of complications from his premature birth.
The baby boy did not have a name, though one of the paramedics who helped deliver the twins nicknamed him “Tom” and his brother “Jones”, after Tom Jones Street in Benoni, where the bus broke down.
“He was very small and struggling to breathe, so I could see he was going to have a lot of problems,” said Andre Momberg, the Emer-G-Med paramedic who delivered and nicknamed the baby twins.
“It’s quite sad, even though I know that twins are usually premature and they’re not always the healthiest of little ones.
“But when we passed them off to the hospital, they were in a very stable condition.
“So I didn’t expect the baby to die.”
The boys’ mother, a 21-year-old Malawian woman named Mercy Ndlovu, was seven months pregnant when the bus, which was carrying 38 passengers, broke down at the side of the road.
The bus had already been travelling for three weeks and it was stuck on the roadside for three days even before Ndlovu had begun giving birth, Momberg said.
“These babies were born under extreme conditions,” said Momberg.
“Their mother is very strong.
“Even after the delivery, she was up and about walking to the ambulance to check on the little ones.”
Ndlovu was surprised to discover she was carrying twins, Momberg said.
She and her next of kin have been offered counselling from the Gauteng Social Development Department to help them cope with the loss of the baby, said MEC Nandi Mayathula-Khoza, who announced the infant’s death on Friday morning.
The boy’s twin brother is in stable condition in Tambo Memorial Hospital’s intensive care unit, Mayathula-Khoza added.
Saturday Star