November 25, 2007

Last night we had another delivery. Kind of. The girl came in around 9:00 p.m. to the clinic (it seems like all the babies like to start being born around that time of night around here... and its always on the weekends...) We were up until 4:30 this morning with her, then we finally sent her to the hospital because the placenta was down, covering the cervix, preventing the baby from coming out.

This girl had been in labor though, since 12:00 noon, so she was exhausted. We put her on an IV before we took her to the hospital.

Man, I just can’t get over the conditions here though. The bed she was lying on has a plastic covered foam mattress on it, but it has a few tears in the plastic. So we patched them with tape so nothing could soak into the mattress. She just lay there naked, with a fan pointed at her, with last year's poster for child health week under her to catch the blood that was leaking out of her. When she had to urinate, we held a container under her. When she had to throw up, we held the same container up to her mouth, When she needed to have a bowel movement she had to climb out of the bed and squat on the floor and poop onto a piece of paper. Some blood and fluid spilled off the edge of the mattress and dripped into a puddle on the floor next to the bed. Now and then a lizard or a big black beetle would skitter across the wall. From a hole up in the ceiling, a huge black cockroach watched the scene. A thick black centipede made the bad choice of being outside the door of the room when somebody walked out, and its dead body lay in the doorway, split open on one side with some guts hanging out. A few mosquitoes filled in the empty spots in the room.

I hope that kind of gives you a picture of what it was like. And she had no painkillers either. Anyways, I heard this morning that she had a C-section and they spent quite awhile resuscitating the baby, which by the way came a month early. Evelyn doesn’t expect the baby to live. I am exhausted to say the least.