I Came to Say Goodbye

by Caroline Overington

  Now, I know what you’re thinking, Your Honour. Neil Cowan was a quack and I should have known it, and maybe I did, but I hope you can also understand how desperate we were, when we went looking for people to help us. Seth was still at John Hunter. We hadn’t seen him since that day they’d taken him behind the rubber curtains at Forster General, and my Fat was falling apart, being away from her baby. She’d started walking around in circles, crying and holding one of his bears, like it was a baby. I could hardly stand it. I would have grabbed hold of anyone who told me they could help her.

  The other thing was, our lawyer said some of what Neil Cowan was saying was actually true. Not the bit about how drug companies were poisoning the nation’s babies and the government was turning a blind eye, obviously, but she said, ‘It is true that it’s very difficult to prove that a baby has been shaken.’

  I thought, But how can that be? Because, I suppose, like a lot of people, I thought a shaken baby must look like a rag doll, all limp and loose and floppy and that it would be obvious to anyone that it had been shaken, but our lawyer, she said, ‘Actually, no. A shaken baby looks like any other baby. They don’t have bruises. They don’t have broken bones. The damage is all on the inside. You’ve got to do a scan and even when you do, it’s hard to say Shaken Baby because all the scans can tell you is that the baby is injured, and not how it got injured.’ I thought that was interesting, but still, even after she’d said that, our lawyer said, ‘Look, I’m still not sure Neil Cowan is the right person to have on our side’ and then Haines butted in and said, ‘But why not? He makes sense to me. And at least he is on our side’ which made me think, Haines, you’re not so stupid after all, are you? You know I’m not on your side and so it was Haines who gave Neil Cowan the go-ahead to come up to the court on the day of the hearing and so there he was, standing outside court six, in the same white shirt and too small suit pants, with the same row of pens, trembling with excitement, ready to testify for us.

  Chapter 9

  WE’D BEEN IN THE WAITING AREA about 10 minutes when a voice came over the intercom, saying, ‘Haines, Atley. Parties for Haines, Atley’ which meant it was time to go in and get started, and while I realise that you already know the outcome, Your Honour, I think it’s important that you see how things looked from where we were sitting.

  I’m not going to pretend I can remember every word. What I am going to do instead is give you the guts of it.

  We went into the court – me and Fat, Haines, and Neil Cowan – and we took up the seats in the middle row. The Department’s people – a doctor who had treated Seth; the older woman that had talked to Fat in the waiting room, and so on – took their seats in the same middle row, but on the other side of the room.

  The lawyers sat up front, facing the magistrate, and when the magistrate came in, their team stood up so we all stood up, and they bowed their heads a bit, so we bowed our heads a bit, and the magistrate sat down, and everyone else sat down, and then nothing happened for a while, and I noticed there was a woman tapping on a strange machine, like a little typewriter, but half the size, and I remember thinking, well, at least there will be a record of this, and then the Department’s lawyer stood up and gave her name, and said, ‘I’m here for the Department’ and our lawyer got up and gave her name, and said, ‘I’m here for the parents’ and another lawyer got up and said, ‘I’m here for the John Hunter hospital.’

  I wanted to get up and say, ‘I’m here, too’ but our lawyer, she’d already said, ‘Don’t do that. Just sit quietly at the back with Donna-Faye’ and she’d given instructions to Donna-Faye on how to sit and what to wear and Haines, too, was supposed to be neat and clean, but he hadn’t paid any attention. But anyway, there were people bobbing up and down for a while, giving their names and whatnot, and the woman with the little machine was tap-tap-tapping, and then the magistrate looked up and said, ‘And are the parents here?’ and our lawyer, she said, ‘Yes, Your Honour’ and the magistrate said, ‘Okay then, let’s go.’ Now, our lawyer had already told us that their side would get to go first and it might seem like the magistrate was only getting their side of the story and not to panic, because we’d get our turn.

  Now the first person to go into the witness box was Teddy Blewett, who is the paediatric registrar at John Hunter, which, in plain English, means he is the top doctor for sick kids. I didn’t know him, not then. I know him now. We’re great mates now. But I’m going to write this like it happened then, before we met.

  Teddy had notes with him. Thinking back now, it was impressive how professional he was, how sympathetic and calm. He asked the magistrate if he could read from his notes, and the magistrate said, ‘Please do’ and he basically read the thing. He said, ‘Seth Atley-Haines, born 23 December 2005, presented at Forster General with his mother, Donna-Faye Atley and his father, Paul Haines, shortly after 11 am on 27 March 2006. Seth’s mother told staff that her baby was sick and needed a doctor.’

  He said a trainee doctor was assigned to the case, and she stripped Seth out of his jumpsuit and his nappy, which was stained with diarrhoea. She put a thermometer under Seth’s armpit, and recorded his temperature at 41, which was high. She asked Ms Atley why she’d brought Seth into the hospital, and Ms Atley said Seth had been ‘chucking up’ (meaning, vomiting); that he had been ‘whinging’ and ‘crying’, had ‘runny, yellow poo’ and a ‘runny nose’. She thought he was ‘hot’ and he seemed ‘more floppy’ than usual and he was refusing his bottle and was obviously extremely unwell.

  The hospital’s lawyer interrupted at that point. He said, ‘And those symptoms, are they typical of anything in particular?’ and Teddy, he said, ‘Those symptoms – they could be anything.’

  The lawyer said, ‘By anything, you mean …?’

  Teddy said, ‘Oh, accidental poisoning, infection, anything.’

  The lawyer said, ‘Okay, so what happened next?’ and Teddy said, ‘The team at Forster General didn’t have the equipment necessary to conduct the kind of tests that were needed to find the cause of Seth’s distress, so he was transferred to us at John Hunter, where I myself conducted a series of tests.’

  Their lawyer said, ‘What kind of tests?’ and Teddy said, ‘First a blood and a urine analysis. It all came up clean’ and the lawyer said, ‘And so the next step was?’ and Teddy said, ‘I organised an MRI to see if there was any swelling or bleeding on the brain. I’d already noticed that the fontanelle – the soft spot on Seth’s head – was bulging, and Seth’s head was larger than it should have been, too.’

  The lawyer said, ‘Do you have the results of those tests?’ and Teddy said yes, he had the slides with him, and with the court’s permission, he’d show them, and the magistrate nodded, because that was obviously fairly standard, to get the results of the tests out, and a lightbox was switched on, and Teddy put the scans, like X-rays, on the light board, and he said, ‘This is an MRI scan of Seth Atley-Haines’ brain on the day he was admitted to John Hunter’ and I have to say, that was upsetting, to see our boy’s skull, or his brain to be more accurate, up there on a lightbox. Teddy used a rod to poke at it and say, ‘In a normal scan, there would be a one- or two-centimetre gap between the brain and skull, and in Seth’s scan, see here, there is no gap. The brain has swelled right up to the edge of the skull, and the gap’s filled with blood, and so we had to operate, to drain that blood.’

  ‘I was feeling so upset, looking at that, Your Honour, and I was grateful when the slide came down, but then another one went up, and it was worse. It was like a giant eye – Seth’s eye, but blown up on the screen, to be the size of a head – and it had long veins, like rivers running through it – and Teddy, he said, ‘This is a retinal scan, taken on the day Seth was admitted. These dark spots’ – he pointed to them – ‘they are retinal haemorrhages or, if you prefer, spots of blood, behind the eye.’

  Their lawyer said, ‘And what do these scans tell us?’ and Teddy said, ‘Well, I believe Seth Atley-Haines was shaken, and vigorously, some ti
me in the 24 hours before he was taken to the hospital in Forster.’ Now, I have to tell you, Your Honour, it was a shock to hear somebody say it. We’d been expecting it, we’d seen it in the legal documents, but it was still a shock to hear somebody say that somebody had shaken that little boy. Fat, she kept her head down, but I knew that she was crying. Haines, he snorted, ‘That is such bullshit’ and our lawyer, she turned around and gave him a look.

  The lawyer, he said, ‘And did you speak to Seth’s parents about that?’ and the doctor shook his head no, and said, ‘We have a team of people at John Hunter – we call them the Child Protection Unit – that swings into action when we have a suspected case of child abuse’ and the lawyer said, ‘And did that unit swing into action?’ and Teddy said, ‘It did’ and the lawyer said, ‘And do you know the conclusion to which it came?’ and Teddy said, ‘The Child Protection Unit is also of the opinion that Seth was shaken’ and the lawyer said, ‘And, just so we are clear, a diagnosis of Shaken Baby Syndrome, it’s something that you come to fairly easily, or only reluctantly?’ and Teddy said, ‘Not reluctantly, but carefully. It’s not something you want to get wrong’ and the lawyer said, ‘And in this case, you are of the view that Seth Atley-Haines was shaken sometime in the 24 hours before he was admitted to hospital?’ and Teddy said, ‘I really have no doubt about it.’

  Haines let out another snort. I heard him say, ‘This is crap’ and again, our lawyer looked sharply at him. Their lawyer said, ‘You know, don’t you, that Seth’s parents say they didn’t shake him? That they’ll argue in court, if not today then tomorrow, that something else must have caused the injury? In your opinion, Dr Blewett, could these injuries have been caused by a baby falling from a bed, or being dropped, or perhaps by a vaccination?’ But Teddy, he said, ‘No, no, vaccination, absolutely not, that is junk science, and it’s not a fall, no’ and the lawyer said, ‘How can you be sure?’ and Teddy said, ‘Well, I hope I can make the court understand this, because it’s important. When a person shakes a baby, the brain moves around inside the skull, and it’s the rotation of the brain that does the damage.’ He said, ‘There are little veins that run between the brain and the skull. In a shaken baby, the veins are torn away from the skull, as the brain swirls around. We call it a shearing injury, or else a rotational injury, and we only see it when a baby has been shaken, not when a baby has fallen, and not when a baby has jerked forward in a car seat, and not when a baby has been bounced on somebody’s knee.’

  The lawyer, he said, ‘And that’s the kind of injury that Seth Atley-Haines has, a shearing injury, a rotational injury?’ and Teddy said, ‘Yes, he does’ and the lawyer said, ‘And he remains in hospital to this day?’ and Teddy said, ‘He does’ and the lawyer said, ‘And why is that?’ and Teddy said, ‘Well, it’s still unclear whether Seth will survive’ and that hit me like a hammer, that statement. The magistrate, who’d been scribbling away, she seemed to have got a shock, too. She said, ‘You mean, Seth’s condition is still critical?’ and Teddy said, ‘He remains on life support. Yes’ and the magistrate said, ‘Why hasn’t life support been removed?’ and Teddy said, ‘Because of these proceedings. We don’t know who has legal responsibility for Seth – is it the State, or is it the parents?’

  The magistrate said, ‘So you’re waiting for my decision, so you can ask either the State, or Seth’s parents, to remove life support?’ and Teddy said, ‘That’s right’ and the magistrate sighed, and shook her head, and made a scribble on her pad, and Fat, who was sitting beside me, put her forehead on her knees and started making loud choking noises and I had to lean over her back to muffle her and also to hide my own crying, because it was around then that I realised what was actually at stake in that court. We’d gone there thinking, oh, we’re going to bring Seth home. We hadn’t really understood that even if we won, so much of Seth was lost.

  Chapter 10

  I GUESS YOU KNOW BETTER THAN me what it’s like to be in court, Your Honour. One side gets up and puts their case and it seems like you’re gone for all money, and then your side gets up, and suddenly, there’s hope. That’s what happened in the court case, with Seth. Their side went through the arguments, the injury, and how it must have happened, and how it couldn’t have been an accident, and how the parents must be to blame, then our lawyer got up, and it seemed like the tide was turning.

  The first question our lawyer put to Teddy was this one: ‘Do you know for certain that Seth was shaken?’ and of course, Teddy had to say, ‘Well, no, I don’t know for certain, but I believe he was shaken’ and that gave our lawyer a chance to say, ‘But you don’t know for certain, do you?’ and he had to say, ‘No, I don’t, it’s my opinion’ and our lawyer said, ‘But you do know that Seth’s parents say that they absolutely did not shake their baby, don’t you? You know that they say the opposite, that they took their sick baby to hospital for treatment – that is something that good, caring parents would do – and they have had to fight the accusation ever since that they did something to harm their child?’

  Teddy said he couldn’t really comment on that, but if our lawyer was asking whether he believed the baby was shaken then the answer was yes, he did.

  Our lawyer said, ‘Yes, but you don’t know for certain, do you? Come to that, you don’t know for certain what happens when any parent shakes a baby, do you?’

  Teddy looked perplexed. He said, ‘It causes brain damage.’ He said, ‘The baby usually dies, and if the baby doesn’t die, the brain is so badly damaged that there is no quality of life.’

  Our lawyer said, ‘But how do you know that? I mean, has anybody – and by anybody, I mean a medical professional or a social scientist – ever taken a group of babies, and shaken some, and not shaken others, to see what happens when you shake a baby?’

  Teddy said, ‘Of course not.’

  Our lawyer said, ‘Well then, how do you know what happens to the brain when you shake a baby?’ and Teddy said, ‘I’ve looked at scans of babies whose parents have admitted to shaking their babies’ and our lawyer said, ‘And those scans, they are from babies the same age as Seth, are they? The same size? The same weight? They were shaken in the same way? The same number of times? With the same force? By a person with the same strength? Suffering the same level of frustration?’ and of course Teddy said, ‘Well, I can’t be sure about that’ and our lawyer said, ‘No, you can’t, can you. But can you tell this court whether parents ever admit to shaking their babies?’ and Teddy said, ‘Sometimes’ and our lawyer said, ‘How often?’ and Teddy said, ‘I couldn’t put a precise figure on it’ and our lawyer said, ‘Well then, take a guess. How many parents have admitted it to you?’ and Teddy said, ‘From memory, two’ and our lawyer said, ‘Two?’ and Teddy said, ‘Two that I can remember. It might be more than that.’

  Our lawyer said, ‘So you’ve seen scans from two babies whose parents admitted to shaking, and comparing those scans with Seth’s scans, you’ve now decided that he must have been shaken, too?’ and Teddy said, no, he was able to compare Seth’s scans with the scans of other shaken babies from other hospitals, and our lawyer said, ‘But what kind of babies are they? The same age, the same weight as Seth? And do we know that they were shaken, or do we assume that they were shaken, because their scans look like the scans of other babies that were also assumed to have been shaken? This doesn’t sound like a very precise science.’

  Teddy said, ‘I know what you are getting at but it’s actually more complicated than that. I might see one or two case of measles every year, but I know when I see it’ and that’s when our lawyer really pounced. She said, ‘But shaken baby is not like measles, is it? There’s a test for measles. There’s a test for mumps. But there is no test for Shaken Baby Syndrome.’

  She paused. She waited. She said, ‘Am I wrong? You can’t test for it, can you?’ and Teddy, he had to say, ‘Well, I’ve looked at the scans, and as I’ve said, that type of injury – the sheared veins – that doesn’t happen when you drop a baby, or when a baby jerks f
orward in a car seat, or when you’re out jogging with a baby in a backpack, or when a baby rolls off the bed.’

  He said, ‘I’ve seen babies that have rolled off beds, or fallen onto the floor, and the injuries are not the same. When I see that kind of injury –’ and here, he pointed up at Seth’s scan on the lightbox, and he said, ‘When I see that kind of injury, I know it’s a shaking injury.’

  Our lawyer said, ‘Excuse me, Dr Blewett, but you do not know it’s a shaking injury. You assume it’s a shaking injury.’

  She said, ‘It’s an assumption you are making, and given that both parents say that no such thing happened, it’s quite a leap.’

  She said, ‘For the benefit of this court, let’s be clear, it is your opinion that Seth was shaken. It is your medical opinion and it is your professional opinion but still an opinion, and an opinion is not a medical fact’ and with that, she sat down.

  What was my reaction to that? Well, as I’ve said, Teddy Blewett has lately become a friend of mine. I respect him. In some ways, I probably even love him. I can look back and think, well, it must have been hard on him, what we put him through. But at the time? At the time, I suppose I had that adrenalin running through me, the kind that people get when they go into court. It’s like a battle, you see, you against them, and when you have a bit of a victory, you think, ‘Take that!’ and, ‘We’re gonna win this thing!’ and you lose sight of the fact that it’s not supposed to be about winning. It’s supposed to be about truth.

  Chapter 11

  AFTER TEDDY LEFT THE STAND, THE magistrate got up from her seat, and that was a sign for all of us to get up while she left the room, and then to sit back down, then get up again and go outside to stretch our legs. Haines made a rollie. I needed a cigarette myself but first wanted to talk to our lawyer. I said, ‘How are we doing?’ and she said, ‘Look, they haven’t been able to prove anything’ and Haines, picking strands of tobacco from the tip of his tongue, said, ‘There’s nothing to prove.’