Wow, so much to say! Yesterday was a crazy first day...started by meeting Esau the director of the azur clinic who I am moving in with next week. Then as a team of midwives we went and did a post/antenatal ward round and I was given the task of checking all the babies temperatures and their heart rate - most of the babies had been born in the early hours of that morning and were absolutely tiny. If they were cold we wrapped them up in woollen jumpers knitted from home and put them skin to skin with mother (how they were cold I don't know, it was boiling). After lunch we went over to meet Charlie (a UK obstetrician here for 6 months) at Hoima hospital and I was thrown in at the deep and watching/assisting in delivering a baby! It was all a successful labour so it was really exhilarating even though most of what I was doing was fanning the mother and holding her hand! It made me so happy when her little baby boy was born a little blue but he quickly started breathing :) watching the birth of the placenta was less appealing and much more gruesome - not for the faint hearted!
Today I wandered around Hoima in the morning visiting the school. This afternoon I managed catch the end of a caesarian section after a ruptured uterus and a still birth with the mother ending up having a stillborn baby :( there was a lot of blood loss and shockingly she had the last thing of blood of her type in the hospital! I helped in her recovery when she came round, keeping check of her obs and making her as comfortable as possible. Rhi and I ended up walking down Hoima high street in our scrubs to buy morphine over the desk from a pharmacy - that would get you struck off back home!
The hardest part for me was that we couldn't communicate with the family so they had no idea what was going on or that there was no baby...it was heartbreaking and eventually when they were told it was very upsetting!
It has been an exhausting couple of days but I am loving it and Charlie says he's going to make me into an obstetrician yet ;)
Lotsa love xxx
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