bringing life into the world

Outside of our routine clinic duties, we are always on call for whatever emergency may be thrown our way. Keeping in mind that we are located an hour outside of the city if traveling by bus, when emergencies happen in any of the villages on the road into the capital, people tend to stop by our clinic, because we are the only clinic in the area that is staffed 24 hours a day. Luckily, emergencies don’t happen too incredibly often, but we have seen our fair share just within my first month and a half.

January 24^th…I was just finishing cleaning up after consults in the external clinic (doctor had already left), and a pickup truck pulls in. Judging by the look on the guy’s face, and the speed at which he was running, I knew we were in for a treat. Says his wife (16-year-old) is having a baby in the back of the pickup. After yelling to the others I was working with to grab some supplies, I hop in the back of the truck, and sure enough, there the baby is. He was born en route to the hospital, in the back of a pickup truck. We got them up to the internal clinic, where we have better supplies, and luckily, we were able to get ahold of one of the volunteer German doctors. Since she had already taken care of the hard part on her own, all that was left was cutting the cord, delivering the placenta, cleaning them up, and keeping them in observation overnight. We got a bag of fluids into the mom, and her and baby were both fine.

January 25^th…I’m sitting in Casa Personal (the volunteer house), eating breakfast, when we get a call on the radio. Another woman is coming up to the internal clinic in labor. Seriously…2 babies in 2 days? This was and interesting week. She gave birth to an adorable baby boy about an hour and a half after arriving. Once again, mom and baby were both fine. They stayed in our clinic overnight, and went home the next day, with a reference to a health center near where they lived in 10 days to have a checkup, and to get the baby set up on a vaccination schedule.

After these couple days, it has become obvious to us that we need to put together an emergency birthing set. Our clinic is not exactly equipped to be delivering babies, so thankfully these two births were uncomplicated cases, and everything turned out fine. We’ve joked about setting up a labor ward down at the external clinic. I don’t know how these women do it…no drugs, delivering babies in the back of pickups, going at unknown speeds down the good and bumpy highways into the city. They are truly amazing.