towards you and I ALWAYS slam into it when I try to leave the
hospital....can't I learn to PULL it to open it? A crowd had
gathered right outside the gate and I walked over to see who was
coming to the hospital at 2 am. It could not be good. A woman was
there in the back of a wooden-cow-drawn cart. She was laying amidst
a bunch of rice bags and her family members were crowded around
her. She was really stiff and when she threw up she could hardly
move from the position she was in which caused her to be a mess. The
family had her wrapped in a blanket tightly and so all we had to do
was pick her up like a mummy and put her on our stretcher. We
carried her into the delivery room because they said she was three
months pregnant.
She was so cold. I have never felt anyone so cold before. The
temperature didn't even register on my little glass thermometer. If
she hadn't talked to me I might have guessed she was dead. I tried
to take her blood pressure but it was no use. I couldn't hear a
thing. Augustan tried to find her pulse but there was nothing in
her wrists and he went up to her neck and found a faint beat. I
grabbed my little Costco blanket (thank-you goodwill) that I'd been
sleeping on just twenty minutes before and we tucked it up around her
and over her head. She was so cold.
Next, we searched for a vien on her. All of them were so clamped
down but finally the IV was started on her forearm. Fluids ran in
and this let us rest a bit easier. James had been called and
slipped into our crowded delivery room. The woman had been bleeding
for 2 days now and this indicated that it was a spontaneous
abortion. She was taken into the surgical ward where they preped
her for a curettage. They needed to clean out her uterus. It was
one of the messiest things I'd seen. The woman was given some
ketamine and the surgery began. She was hooked up to a heart monitor
and the beeping played this little one-noted song.
Then, it all stopped. We heard nothing. No more song. One of
the nurses jumped and started thumping her chest. James stopped
them and we waited a little longer. Everyone just held so
still. You see here in Chad you are at the mercy of alot of
things. When a baby is not breathing well, it's not like you can put
her on a respirator. It's not like you can monitor the increase and
decrease in pulse all through the night for every deathly ill
person. And it's not like you can jump start a heart with a
defibrillator. You simply do your best and when people pull
through, it doesn't ruin your day and when they don''t, it really does.
Soon the beeping came back...her heart started again.
I hated hearing that silent sound. It was stressful. James
explained that she was just so cold and that maybe everything just
constricted for a minute or two. The woman pulled through and the
morning came for her.
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