Pinoy nurse widower fights deportation in UK

Britain is deporting the Filipino husband of a nurse who died in 2004 in what was believed to be a case of medical malpractice.

Arnel Cabrera, 38, was given until the end of February to pack his things and return to the Philippines upon completion of the inquest proceedings on the case involving the death of his wife, Mayra, 30.

Arnel is currently appealing to the Home Office to allow him to stay in England and raise his three-year-old son, Zachary. He is facing deportation because his visa was dependent on his wife working.

Mayra died shortly after giving birth to Zac on May 11, 2004 after an epidural anaesthetic was wrongly injected into her arm during childbirth rather than into the space of her spinal cord. The incident happened at Great Western Hospital, Swindon, Wiltshire where she was working as a theatre nurse since moving to Britain in 2002.

Arnel was initially told by doctors that his wife died from a rare amniotic fluid embolism. Later, he learned that she died because the drug Bupivacaine was wrongly administered.

At the inquest into Mayra’s death on Monday, Arnel said they went to the United Kingdom in 2002 to start a new life.

"The person who gave Mayra that drug robbed me of my family. I want to know how it happened. I can't forget. I need to know whether the action was intentional or unintentional. How can anyone make this kind of error and not be made to answer for it? I was very angry I'd been lied to for so long about how my wife died," said Arnel, who worked as a technician at the hospital.

Doctors should have eased her birth pains by giving her an anaesthetic in the epidural space in the spinal cord.

Reports said UK women give birth with help of an epidural. It is a local anaesthetic injected into the lower spine to relieve pain in labor.

But the drug was fed from a drip bag wrongly connected to a tube leading into her right hand, the inquest at Trowbridge, Wilts, heard. The tube was intended for another painkiller or saline solution.

The couple went to the hospital before 4 a.m. on May 11, 2004. At 8:14 a.m, a healthy 8-pound Zachary was delivered with forceps.

But by 9 a.m., Mayra began to feel dizzy. She started to fit and frothed at the mouth before having a heart attack.

Efforts to resuscitate her failed and she was pronounced dead at 10:47 a.m. - GMANews.TV

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