Unexpected Phone Call

I got a call around 11pm last night from one of the volunteers who was doing a night shift at the hospital. The Ob/Gyn from Alaska said that he needed an internist right away because he had a pregnant woman just arrive. She sounded like she was taking her last breaths. 

Safe twin delivery yesterday (the midwife on the right
is the one who was on the nightshift last night)

The only internist I knew was the American who has been working at the hospital since the fall for Partners In Health. I called a friend who passed along the message. 10min later the internist arrived at the hospital.

The story I got early this morning when the volunteers returned from their shift goes as follows:

At the beginning of our shift, nothing was really going on, so we decided to put in a movie. About a minute later, a man walks into maternity with a limp woman in his arms. She was making some faint sounds, but it was obvious that her breathing was obstructed. She was having an asthma attack.

The man was not her husband and did not know that she was pregnant. He had just walked in looking for someone to help. (We don’t know who he was, but he saved her life by carrying her to the hospital).

The staff midwife who was on the shift with us said, “Why don’t we just put an IV in her and wait for her breathing to get better?” We replied that she would die if something more couldn’t be done to improve her breathing.

Some children hanging out after school (Cheryl Hannah-Truscott photo).

We then went to the ER thinking that the staff there could help us. The 1^st year resident that we found said that they could not take her because she was pregnant. 

We were running out of options. The medical director even stopped by and said that we could use the hospital oxygen, but we knew that this woman needed more help than that! He left after we declined.

That’s when we called Carrie to see if she couldn’t get ahold of the internist (who we had just met in passing during our hospital tour with Carrie) to come examine the patient.

When the internist came, she immediately went to the ER, took the nebulizer, and filled out a prescription for some proper drugs. The woman slept soundly the rest of the night, breathing and alive.

One of our volunteers showing a "skin-to-skin" youtube video.

This chain of events illustrates how a simple process of getting someone out of danger can be hindered by the lack of skills, knowledge, and proper protocols for fast and accessible healthcare. It’s not that the Haitians staffing St. Therese Hospital don’t care about the ill and dying, it’s that they aren’t equipped with the right training to do all that they really could do. Even our midwives who go through an intensive training struggle with making the right decisions on a day-to-day basis. I am a firm believer of the UN's principle, "a human right to healthcare," in its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but something is missing! I think it should instead include, “a human right to First World healthcare,” or care that you and I and, hopefully, most people in the United States and other developed countries have access to. 

Post-op baby (Cheryl Hannah-Truscott photo).