A grieving couple has been left traumatised after a NSW hospital cremated their stillborn baby girl by mistake.
Stella Pirko and Anthony Meyers, of Padstow, Sydney, asked staff at Liverpool Hospital to undertake genetic testing and an autopsy on their daughter, Krystal Rose, who was born at 28 weeks in October 2016.
Their request, however, was never carried out.
Instead, after spending nine days in the mortuary, the couple's little girl was released to a funeral home for cremation.
"The baby was down in the storage room, no one cared, no one did anything," Mr Meyers told Nine News of the distressing ordeal.
Ms Pirko and Mr Meyers were subsequently shocked to discover that the doctor who had authorised for Krystal to be cremated was in charge of their request for genetic testing.
"Why did he authorise the cremation if he knew the post mortem wasn't done?" Ms Pirko said. "We trusted them to do their jobs, to find out what happened to our baby. We cannot fathom how this happened."
Ms Pirko was halfway through her pregnancy when a scan detected that their daughter had an enlarged bladder.
"He [the doctor] turned around and said I recommend terminating, there's this issue with the bladder and 100 per cent of my patients terminate," Ms Pirko said.
"I couldn't think, it didn't make sense. Why wouldn't you try to fix it and help?"
When she was 28 weeks pregnant, a scan revealed that Krystal Rose's bladder had grown to over 10cm and was affecting her organs. The couple were faced with the devastating reality that they needed to terminate the pregnancy.
The heartbreaking news, however, was only the beginning of a series of traumatic events to befall the young couple.
After being induced, Ms Pirko described the delivery as "horrific", noting that her room was not equipped with gas for pain relief and that staff struggled to remove the placenta.
"He [the doctor] grabs the umbilical cord," she said of the birth, "and he wraps it around his wrist and he grabs and he pulls and he pulls so hard that my butt comes off the bed and it snaps."
"I told them 'help. I can't, it's not happening, take me to theatre'."
Grieving the loss of their baby girl, Ms Pirko and Mr Meyers were told to wait for a phone call following their daughter's autopsy, hoping for answers.
"What is the chance if we fall pregnant again, this going to happen to us again?" Mr Meyers says he wanted to know.
A month after their daughter's death, however, the pair received a phone call from the Feto-Maternal Unit consultant at Liverpool Hospital, which left them in shock. The autopsy had never been conducted, and Krystal had been cremated. It appears the paperwork authorising the autopsy went missing - and no one was responsible for the hospital mortuary after the full-time mortuary technician role was scrapped due to lack of funding.
General Manger of Liverpool Hospital, Robynne Cooke, told Nine News that she was sorry "we let [the parents] down".
"I said to Stella and Anthony that I would do my utmost to support them ongoingly throughout the next part of the process," she said.
For the couple, however, the traumatic experience has had an impact on multiple facets of their life - and their health. And an apology just isn't enough.
"For us, an apology is not going to bring our baby back, an apology is not going to give us answers," Mr Meyers said.
The pair's wedding, which was supposed to take place in July, has been postponed indefinitely. Ms Pirko is now seeing a psychologist for post-traumatic stress and suffers from nerve pain after the labour.
"It has impacted our lives, in a dramatic and horrific way," Ms Pirko said.
Last year, Royal North Shore Hospital came under fire after it was revealed that two stillborn babies had been cremated by mistake.
Speaking to ABC radio at the time, former NSW Health Minister Jillian Skinner said that there would always be errors in the health system.
"These mistakes have been happening since time immemorial," she said.
"What we're trying to do is minimise these mistakes.
"Every incident is very regrettable, and that's why we're putting in place measures to try and make sure we learn from those mistakes and that we don't repeat them."
Liverpool Hospital told Nine News that the incident involving Krystal Rose had resulted in "new safeguards" and that a full-time mortuary technician was in the process of being recruited.
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