Just as we were celebrating that Jemena had taken back her baby and was successfully breastfeeding her, and Mme. Nono’s recent healthy birth, our Human Rights monitors got called to see a woman who had been bleeding since noon. It was almost 5:00pm then, so we got on our motorcycle and hurried to her place. She was there on the dirt floor of her house, on a makeshift stretcher.
Mme. Antonie on her stretcher as we take her to the truck for the hospital.
We immediately contacted the only man in the community with a truck, and hired him to bring Mme. Antonie to the hospital. Getting him and bringing the truck took about an hour. We later found that it was during this time that the baby inside Antonie stopped moving and died, probably drowning on her mother’s blood.
This is what we have for an ambulance.
Everybody around helped us put Antonie in the truck. She had been bleeding for more than 6 hours now, and lost 4 units of blood.
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- Mme. Antonie on her stretcher as we take her to the truck for the hospital.
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- This is what we have for an ambulance.
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- Our Human Rights monitor, Estela, and Antonie as we bring her to the Barahona hospital.
At the hospital, we got past the usual hurdles of bringing in a Haitian woman, and she was eventually attended to. The doctors could not hear the baby’s heartbeats, and she was bleeding, so she had to ahve an emergency C-section. There was no anesthesiologist in town, so she had to be transported to the hospital in Barahona, 135km away. Our project does not have a car, the hospital’s ambulance was already in Barahona, and the firemen’s ambulance was broken down, so the situation looked very dire. We finally found an ambulance at the Dominican Red Cross’ headquarters, and paid all the costs up front. These ambulances are just vans with a stretcher — they don’t include any paramedics, or equipment — so we had to get Antonie on the stretcher, load her on the van, and take her to Barahona.
Our Human Rights monitor, Estela, and Antonie as we bring her to the Barahona hospital.
Once at Barahona, we had Antonie taken in immediately. Again, we had to do everything, as this other hospital is just as understaffed. The doctors performed a C-section and removed her dead baby. We were brought in to see the body. It was a full-term baby, and the doctors and nurses told us that she had probably died just a few hours earlier, meaning that if we had arrived earlier or had better transportation, we could have saved her.
Antonie needed 4 units of blood, and her severely damaged uterus had to be surgically repaired. Her prognosis is bad. As for the body of her baby, the hospital asked if we were going to purchase a casket to take her back to Pedernales. With just enough money left to pay for Antonie’s blood, we had to leave the body of the baby for the hospital to dispose of. The nurses put the baby on a cardboard box taken from the garbage and put the box on the floor to be removed later.
It hardly needs to be said that we desperately need to have our own transportation and a house in Pedernales where we can lodge women when they are close to their due date. Such basic facilities would allow us to prevent another unforgivable death like this one. We will continue to do our best given the circumstances, but we desperately need to secure the funding for an ambulance and a community health house. These are the two top priorities for emergency care now.
Antonie already has 8 children, and was on our list of women who wanted birth control urgently. We are still trying to procure funding for this. Our list now includes over 60 women from the community who would like to have birth control. Continue to watch this blog space for more information on the development of our Borderlands Community Health Initiative.
