NATIONAL NEWS - She lost her first daughter because nurses at a government hospital mixed up babies just after they were born.
She didn’t know it at the time and raised the baby she was given as her own.
She lost that daughter two years ago when DNA tests proved the teenager was someone else’s child.
The traumatised mother is still looking for her daughters … her blood child, and the one she raised as hers.
She waits regularly under a tree for a car to take her to government-provided counselling.
She said she saw a red flag in the beginning after giving birth at the Tambo Memorial Hospital on the East Rand. The nurse gave her a baby girl with two name tags, two different surnames. She reported her confusion to the nurse who conducted her own investigation.
She said the nurse returned the baby to her and told her she had the right baby. She went home with the baby she believed was hers and told her partner what had happened.
Little did she know her life would change more than a decade later when an infidelity issue led to the biological truth of the child being revealed.
She explained: “I came home from an event and walked in on him cheating and then he told me he had a dream that the oldest of our four children was not his.
“He started saying our oldest daughter did not look like our other children. That was when we separated and I took him to maintenance court.”
Delaying the cases of the other children, the focus became primarily about the oldest daughter and after two DNA tests, it was revealed that neither she nor her partner were her biological parents.
She said that was when everything began to go downhill.
