When new mum Taryn Dryfhout was told that her baby boy was stillborn, she refused to believe the devastating news. But this wasn’t a young woman in denial about losing her precious first child at birth. The reason Taryn knew that little Jonny-Ray was definitely alive and healthy was that she was actually standing by his bassinet, watching him sleep peacefully.
The bizarre confusion about whether Jonny-Ray was alive or dead happened after his dramatic birth at Queen Mary Hospital in Dunedin. Although complications meant he was lucky to survive the delivery, Jonny-Ray was accidentally listed with authorities as a stillborn baby.
Taryn (22) and her husband Stephen (24) only found out that their son was officially dead when they tried to get a birth certificate for him from Births, Deaths and oarriages. Taryn made several calls to the Government department but couldn’t find out why there was a problem issuing a birth certificate.
Finally, she spoke to a woman who revealed the shocking news there could be no birth certificate for Jonny-Ray until his death certificate was issued, because he was listed as stillborn. They wanted proof that Jonny-Ray was alive before they would consider issuing a birth certificate.
“I don’t have a stillborn baby!” Taryn protested. But the woman insisted. “Yes you do. I can see here there was a baby born on the 3rd of August 2007 who died.”
“No, I’m looking at him. He’s in his bassinet sleeping,” she replied, knowing the date was Jonny-Ray’s birthday. The woman said she would get a manager to ring Taryn about the dilemma but even then, the drama was far from resolved.
“Half an hour later, a manager rang up and absolutely insisted that my baby had died and there was no birth certificate coming until I had applied for the death certificate,” says Taryn, cuddling Jonny-Ray, now 17 months old.
“Nothing I said would convince him. I had to get my midwife and my GP to write a letter saying they had seen the live baby before I could get the birth certificate.”
It was three months before Taryn finally received her baby’s birth certificate. It’s taken some detective work for Taryn to get to the bottom of her son’s mysterious return from the dead but she’s finally getting answers. The mix-up seems to have started when Jonny-Ray had breathing problems at birth and needed to be resuscitated. Taryn says the labour was so long and gruelling, she feared her baby wouldn’t make it.
“I pushed for an hour and a half and they said they could feel a lump beside his head, which turned out to be his elbow. They offered me a caesarean and while I was waiting, the baby’s heart rate started dropping. By the time we got to theatre, they were in a big hurry to get him out. There was a lot of panicking and one of the doctors got so upset that she had to step away and she was covered in blood and crying,” says Taryn, who was numbed and awake for the caesarean.
As the surgeons worked on her, Taryn believed that her baby wasn’t going to make it. “I thought it was all over. I kept asking if the baby was okay but all they would say was, ‘It will be alright.’ They wouldn’t say the baby’s fine.
By the time Jonny-Ray was born, he was blue and needed to be resuscitated immediately. “I could see Stephen watching him in the corner and he was absolutely bawling, so I thought ‘That’s it, the baby’s died’, and I started screaming hysterically,” she says.
“Eventually they got him breathing. It seemed like forever but it was probably just a few minutes.”
The difficult caesarean left Taryn with a wound four times the normal size and she lost a litre of blood. She’s also been warned against going into labour again. “oy gynaecologist said it would be risky to get pregnant again but we are considering adoption,” says Taryn, who has recently moved to Auckland with her young family.
But at this stage, looking after an active little Jonny-Ray is quite enough for his parents to handle. “He’s really funny and very cheeky, and he’s so full of life,” says Taryn. “And that’s just the way we like it.”
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