In August it will be ten years since Lennart (2) died. A year later, Mother Wendy wrote about what touched her so much in the morgue. “I remembered almost bumping into the large bed in which I had to put Lennart. That was an ordinary hospital bed.”
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That hurt, because at home he was still so comfortable in his crib. “He wasn’t ready for a big bed yet. It didn’t feel like I could leave him in that bed as a loving parent.”
‘Got stomach ache from it’
She wrote a blog about it. She also reached Floortje Agema, who works in the morgue of Radboudumc. “I saw her blog and it gave me a stomach ache,” she tells RTL Nieuws. “I had not worked there very long and thought: we will do that too.”
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It turns on during a work meeting. Her hospital therefore had a special children’s cooling stretcher made. A stretcher for children, such as for an ambulance, already exists. The children’s cooling stretcher is intended for cooling the morgue.
‘Not like on TV’
Because it does not go there as we see in films and television series. Floortje would like to get rid of that image. “People are not pushed in a hatch with a card on their leg. It is a large room, where the cooling stretchers are.”
The special stretcher for children is a lot shorter than the one for adults, 1.20 meters instead of 2 meters. “We also make it up like a cot. It has a duvet cover and a fleece blanket.”
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Such a smaller stretcher does not solve the suffering, Floortje emphasizes. “It is not as if it is suddenly not bad anymore. It remains horrible to leave your child in a morgue. But we do show that we realize that it is a child. That it is different from an adult who passed away. This is important for parents to see. “
Working together
Wendy is happy with the special cooling stretcher. “The people that Floortje now takes care of in the morgue do not know how it would be otherwise. But I hear from people who lost their child who think: it would have been this way with us.”
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And so Wendy and Floortje go together to ensure that the children’s cooling stretcher is placed in all the morgues. There is also interest in at least one other hospital.
The women also occasionally have app contact, when Floortje has had to use the children’s cooling stretcher. “Then I text: I have to think about Lennart again. Wendy then knows that the stretcher had to be used.”
Not yet seen
“We prefer to use it as little as possible, but when we need it, it’s with pride,” says Floortje. “We want to care for a deceased as much as you would for a living patient.”
Wendy hasn’t seen the stretcher in person yet. “I wasn’t ready for that for a long time, but now I am. So soon it will happen. I’m really looking forward to it.”
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