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Baby #7
Her name is Fat-Hiya Aly Salum.
She is a beautiful young girl, thin, lighter olive skin, 19 years old, and she is pregnant.
Her hair is long and whimsically braided in big sections that swell and twist and taper into thin air, like the ebb and flow of woven raw silk.
She has deep round eyes with fluffy dark eyelashes, and when she smiles, her full lips part to reveal her sweet little grin, with spaces between each tooth.
When she stands to walk around, her long legs take careful steps as her knobby knees wobble under the pain (and her top-heavy tummy), like a young foal learning to stand on its own. Her long neck cranes and her elegant limbs extend to stabilize herself in her new surroundings of metal shelves, flat beds, and the smell of antiseptic.
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She has been fully dilated for a while now, but she has taken local medicine which has toyed with her regular contraction pattern. So she has been writhing in unending pain since I saw her in the morning. Her contractions have been very strong and unnecessarily painful for hours.
It is her first pregnancy, and she is markedly fearful. Her eyes flash wide with the searing pangs that overtake her tummy... the baby is coming soon.
I keep a watch on her every time I walk past, and once I see her membranes bulging, I prepare all that is needed for delivery.
Her membranes are bulging (her amniotic sac is intact and now looks like a water balloon coming down the canal.) At this point we rupture them (for they have not broken on their own) with the tip of the cord clamp, but manage to only get a small puncture, so the water is squirting out of a small hole.
Slowly, slowly, the baby’s coming down.
It’s painful for her, often there’s a look of horror on her face that sometimes she cannot even make a sound. The perineum looks tight and I question whether it will be able to stretch.
In this moment, it dawns on me that here I am, experiencing with her probably the most excruciating moment of her life.
Everything is going okay, it’s just not that fast. It’s good that the skin is slowly stretching, letting the birth take its course, not doing anything unnecessary...
The baby’s head crowns. This is the most painful part of the whole birth, termed the “ring of fire”.
This goes on for probably 10 minutes. Her eyes plead to mine but we reassure her that everything is going great!
I cannot imagine the pain. At this point the nurses would probably do fundal pressure, pulsing hard in forceful jolts on the top of her belly to get the head out. No, I’m not going to anything of the sort. We just wait and let baby come as he wants. My goal is to watch the perineum. It looks tight, but we’re trying our best to take it slow and do all that we can to help it not tear.
The head crowns... and baby delivers soon after. What a handsome baby! He is so cute, he’s captured my heart at the very sight of him!
I am thankful for the way I could take my time for this delivery. Especially for care after the baby was born. I didn’t have to be anywhere, the labour room wasn’t busy, all I had to worry about was Fat-Hiya and her having the best first delivery experience she could have. I knew she was scared and fearful and skittish, so I stayed with her, smiled a lot, and was very gentle in everything that I did. You could literally see her nerves calming down as we became familiar faces and pillars of trust to her, offering a comforting smile and a soft touch.
We brought baby over as soon as possible and she got to lay with him. It is so beautiful to see the sweet bond established as this young girl now becomes a mom.
I cleaned her up, changed her khanga, and when I checked her for tears, I was amazed! No tearing.
I was amazed, mostly at God, that our bodies are so well-made!
She looked so tight before, I was even wondering if she would need an episiotomy, but here she is, tear-free, with only a few scrapes that will heal on their own. Praise the Lord!
It was a long day for her. Hours and hours of pain and discomfort, but now,
she has a healthy, handsome little son beside her,
and she doesn’t need stitches.
Yes, this is how it is supposed to be.
She smiled at me with her young, bashful eyes, her childish braids going this way and that.
After she had rested, and was ready to go the Postnatal Ward,
she hopped off the bed,
fished through her basket, and the next time I looked she was all intricately wrapped up in a saffron scarf,
covering her whole body and leaving only a window to
see, breathe, and talk.
Suddenly, this woman that I knew, her beautiful hairline and elegant neck, the shape of her shoulders and the look of her hair, now was hidden.
Even though you could see her features, the scarf was distorting the loveliness of her face into a contrived shape, that she didn’t even look like herself anymore.
I then realized yet
another reason why the labour room is a special place.
We get to see women with their heads uncovered, before they put on their veils and become a shapeless figure out on the street.
The labour room is a place full of rawness, transparency, trust, and where guards are let down.
A place of intensity,
vulnerability,
and nakedness.
Where it is safe to show your shoulders and reveal that which has been covered.
What a privilege, what holy ground,
to be in the place where
the veil comes off,
all is known,
and new life comes into the world.
Merry Christmas!
drinking hot cocoa at night and putting our scissor skills to work making Christmas tree decorations out of free Airplane magazine pages. Paper chains, woven hearts, snowflakes...
Here is a team photo of us looking mighty official.
We're still loving working at the hospital... it is crazy that we have less than a month here now.
