Inspiring NYTimes article: Weighing the Lives of Babies in Haiti
Posted by christina
For Embrace, reading stories like this in the media saddens us, but provides us with more fuel for the fire. We are working tirelessly so that, hopefully, 5 years from now, we won’t have to read about these stories any longer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/health/28cases.html?_r=1
A snip-it from the article:
So it was on that rainy Sunday evening that there were six women in active labor in the emergency room. And soon one of them, in her late teens, gave birth to a tiny boy, just 2 pounds 3 ounces. A neonatologist on our team estimated that he was two months premature. (The mother claimed she hadn’t even known she was pregnant.) Once the baby was born, we dried and swaddled him and started looking for a place where he could be cared for until he was stable enough to be sent home. There were no working incubators at the hospital, nor any free beds in the pediatric tents, and we had no luck finding incubators at other hospitals.
Then an American physician at another medical camp told us that he had faced a similar situation some days before, and had built his own incubator — “MacGyver” style, as he put it. He suggested we do the same. So that’s what we did. We took a cardboard box from the medical supply room, padded it with some surgical drapes and a blanket and found a desk lamp with a working bulb to serve as a source of heat. Voilà! Our youngest patient now had an incubator.
The next morning we tried to persuade the attending Haitian pediatrician to accept the baby to the pediatric tents. “Don’t be absurd!” she scoffed, as I recall. “A baby that small will not make it. He has no chance of survival, and we have no spare beds to waste.”