Radio boss Jeridah Andayi opens up on losing her second child
Renowned media personality Jeridah Andayi has opened up about losing her second child.
The radio maestro, a mother of four children, explained in an interview with Citizen, “I lost my second baby when she was two years four months in 2008.
If she lived, she would be 16 today. But I still deliberately make her part of the family. As my two daughters know, they are not the eldest of my daughters.”
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Saying that her firstborn son was by then 4 years and could not comprehend what was happening, Ms. Andayi, the Royal Media Services (RMS) radio presenter, says she is still questioned about their sister’s death.
“I got into RMS in 2004, then got this child in 2006 then she died in 2008. I think the most difficult thing about me losing my child is that I’m not sure whether I did everything to save her life.”
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“Sometimes I feel like, did I fail my own child? Is there anything else I could have done to keep her alive?”
Recounting how everything played out, Ms Andayi said, “It just happened so fast. She was unwell; then we went to the hospital then they say she needs to be admitted. So we put her in an ambulance and rush to the hospital for her admission.”
She continued, “The ambulance had a head on collision with another car that did not give way despite the siren and my child’s head hit the wall’s of the ambulance and everything stopped.”
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Adding she did not know because the baby had fallen asleep, Ms Andayi explained that the driver and medic came out of the vehicle to check the magnitude of the accident and then went behind to check on her and her daughter.
“I heard the medic tell the driver, ‘We have to go! We have to go! Let him (the other driver of the car that caused the accident) be.”
Disclosing that the medic took the baby off her hands and was fixing oxygen.
“It happened so fast. By the time we got to the hospital, the child was technically dead.
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They resuscitated her for like an hour. I tried to get in, but the doctors refused because it was an emergency room, but when I persisted, they let me in.”
The doctors then asked Ms Andayi about the whereabouts of the child’s father, whom she called and came in hurriedly.
“She talked to us and said ‘your daughter has come back to life but I am sorry she is technically dead and her real words were she is a cabbage.”
Saying she did not understand what the doctor was saying, Ms Andayi shared, “She (the doctor) said we could take this child to ICU or we can let her go cause even if she comes back to life she is never going to be the same again. She is brain dead.”
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She agreed to take her daughter to ICU for seven days and watched her die slowly during those seven days. “She didn’t get better, and she kept going down and down.
And the pain of sitting with your child every day, holding her hand, touching her, and asking questions.
That pain is on another level.”
Revealing that the day her daughter stopped breathing, a team of doctors talked to her, Ms. Andayi shares, “Everyone of them was giving a report, and they said there was nothing they could do as even the machines were not working.”
Ms Andayi asked the doctor what she would do if she were in her shoes, to which she responded, “I would pull off the machines because you can keep her here forever, but she is not going to live.”
The doctor said, “Her brain is dead, her heart is not beating as it should, her temperature is dropping, her kidneys have failed, her lungs like everything has failed.”
Ms Andayi added, “We switched off the machines.”
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