Somehow this is so much more heartbreaking. Maybe because my first thoughts were wondering if she'd had the opportunity to hear the gospel in her own language. Maybe because all I could think about after that was her husband and their children at home. What will life be like for them now?
This woman was from the bush and was delivering her sixth child. When you've had that many babies and no pre- or post-natal care, your body gets tired. I'm sure her life of hard physical labor didn't help either. Her uterus never contracted back down after her delivery - a condition know as uterine atony. It's the cause of 75-80% of postpartum hemorrhage.
I was working with a mama in the next bed over and couldn't help but hear what was going on. It was busy in the ward that day with lots of community healthcare workers in-training. There was a crowd around her bed, some coaching, some just watching. I could tell she was having a hard time and she pushed for a long time before I heard the cry of her baby girl.
The staff were frequently in and out of her little curtained area and when I asked, one of the community healthcare workers told me that she was still bleeding. But when I looked in, she was still alert and talking with the midwives and even munching on a cracker.
The doctor came and started a line, gave her a large drip of oxytocin and gave her the baby to nurse. Still, she talked and moved normally.
Not a half hour later, my doula friend came running up and asked me to help her find the doctor. The mama had crashed and was no longer responsive and the midwives had asked her to hunt down the doctor in another ward. It's not safe for an expat woman to walk around the hospital alone so the two of us set off to find him. There was some confusion about what ward he was in and we spent, what felt like WAY too long looking but we eventually found him and told him that he had to get back to labor and delivery immediately.
By the time we all ran back in, the midwives had put mama on oxygen and had brought the crash cart over. The doctor began intubating while trying to do chest compressions at the same time. It was maddening to watch. The doctor is a large, strong man but despite this, his compressions looked pitiful - as would anyone's if attempting it one-handed.
More and more people began gathering around. One of the new infants started wailing so I picked him up and quieted him in an attempt to keep added tensions down. Two other mamas were in transition so my friend and I went back and forth from watching the chaos to rubbing backs. Sometime in there we stopped and prayed right in the middle of the ward.
I held that baby and begged God to spare the woman's life. Her own baby slept quietly in the bassinet right next to her bed the entire time the staff were frantically trying to save her life.
The scene was unbelievable. The doctor, desperately trying to get an airway while giving chest compressions with one hand, the midwives handing him things and starting additional lines for fluids and transfusions. Meanwhile, the blood gushing out of the mama like water.
They worked for a long time before they quit. Her gray body lay uncovered in the bed, legs still splayed, right next to her sleeping baby. There are no words to describe to you the deep sorrow of that scene.
Half a million women die every year from complications of childbirth. That's approximately
1,370 women a day. 1 in 4 simply bleed to death. That's insane.
What can I do to improve this appalling statistic?
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