I know it. And I love it.
Our second day there was incredible. I requested to go to the maternity ward for the morning shift. We walked into the ward at 8am and didn’t see anyone there. We ventured back to the delivery room and pulled back the curtain to reveal a young woman on the table, 10cm dilated, and pushing. Yes! My heart jumped inside my chest. We stood at the food of the bed and waited. After about ten minutes of watching the young girls struggle through her contractions on her own I couldn’t help but go to her side. I asked the nurse to tell her to hold my hand if she needed support. She immediately latched on and squeezed tight. The midwives told us that she had already been pushing for some time now but that she was not pushing the right way. She was nineteen years old and this was her first child. Her name was Britta. After talking to my professor about the delivery later she told me that midwives often blame on the women in labor when there are complications. They called the doctor to come too because they said that if something were to happen they would be blamed if they were to not call the doctor. They told us that this mother could easily deliver a stillborn baby. My heart went out to this woman, this teenager who came from her village to deliver her very first child by herself. And this girl could lose her baby right in front of my eyes…
Britta laced her arm around my neck and held onto my shoulder. We kept urging her “Tonka, tonka!” which means “Push, push”. Still no progress and the baby had been crowning for nearly forty-five minutes. They inserted a small catheter to empty her bladder. I watched as urine leaked everywhere, including the dull and already bloody scissors the midwife picked up next for Britta’s episiotomy…an episiotomy without any anesthetic or medication. I could feel the anxiety and tension in the room grow with each non productive contraction. I was shocked to see the midwife start to perform forceful compressions right above where the baby lay in Britta’s belly in order to push the baby forward. It scared me and I tried to prepare myself as best I could for a stillbirth.
But after an hour of pushing, sweating, worrying, and scary compressions Britta’s tiny baby forced his way into the world as she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. I breathed a sigh of relief and prayer of thanks. The baby was brought to another midwife to be assessed. A few of the other girls followed, wanting to spend time with the new person in the room. But I couldn’t pull myself away from the mother. I’ve found myself to be one hundred percent attached to the mothers in both labor situations that I have experienced so far. How could I leave her now? I stayed with her as she was stitched up. For some reason the midwives had her stand up right after suturing her (maybe 15 minutes after the delivery) and had one of the girls take out her IV. I was standing in front of her, holding her hands to keep her steady, when all of a sudden she dropped in my arms and fainted and blood started squirting out of her IV. We got her back on the bed and the nurse told us that her blood sugar was probably low because she had not eaten since dinner the night before and since she had come to the hospital alone and with no family, she had no food to eat at all! I grabbed a granola bar from my bag and fed it to her bite by bite because she could barely support herself sitting up.
We left soon after. I told her that I would be back to check on her later before we left, knowing that women only stay in the hospital six hours after they deliver!! Try and imagine that. Before I left the ward I stopped to say hello to the little baby we had helped welcome into the world. He was beautiful, wrapped snuggly in a large blue blanket, already sucking his tiny thumb. I stood there looking at him for a minute taking it all in…and thinking, I know this is what I want to do in life. I know it. And I love it.
