By The Tribune Content Agency
Eboni Tomasek expected to take home her newborn the day after he was born in a San Jose hospital. But, without explanation, hospital staff said they needed to stay a second night. Then a third. A nurse said her son had jaundice. Then said that he didn’t. She wondered if they had confused her with another African American mother. In any event, why couldn’t she and the baby boy she’d named Ezekiel go home?
No one would say. “I asked like three times a day. It was brushed off,” Tomasek said, relaying her story by phone as she cradled Ezekiel, now 6 months old, in their San Jose apartment. She was told only that more tests were being run to ensure “everything’s good before you leave.”
She knew that her intensifying anger and fear about the holdup could raise her blood pressure, that Black pregnant women and new mothers are especially vulnerable to hypertension, and that it could kill her. Distraught, she called the person she most trusted to calm her, a caseworker for Santa Clara County’s Black Infant Health program.
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