HAPPPYY THANKSGIVING!

Today I did not sit around the table and enjoy a nice meal with my family. I did not watch a Macy's Day Parade or play kickball with the cousins. I did not have turkey and I definitely didn't have any pumpkin pie. And while I miss my family immensely (its just never nice to be missing a holiday) I know I still have plenty to be thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day celebration. In fact, I am overwhelmed with gratitude.  I started my day out with a 15 minute bumpy rickshaw ride to the hospital. And I put on my uniform and slide on my gloves and then I got to be a midwife. I got to to sit with women and rub there aching backs and look into their frightened eyes and I got to show them a Jesus who loves them. Then I got to welcome life into the world.

I am thankful today that there were no complications.
I am thankful today that I didn't witness any stillbirths or abortions.
I am thankful today that all of our babies were healthy.
I am thankful today that I got to work alongside some pretty amazing women on my team.
I am thankful today for the many opportunities I have at the hospital.
I am thankful today for the mother who I got to labor with who spoke English! Ah, it was amazing.
I am thankful today that I got to talk to my mom and my sister on the phone.
I am thankful for the gift of pregnancy and life and the opportunity to work with women.
I am thankful today for the Muslim women I got to labor with- who are usually completely reserved and covered up but they allow me to be close to them. And they trust me. I am thankful for that.

I have a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.  While it may be a very different Thanksgiving than I have ever experienced before- I have to say I can't imagine being or doing anything else toady. I would really like some pumpkin pie and I would really like to be with my family but I am thankful that I got to celebrate Thanksgiving this way on this day.

Welcome, baby Issac

PS....I am  ALSO thankful for the American missionary family my team met a few weeks ago who invited us over to their house to celebrate with them on Saturday.  Yes! Dreams of turkey and cannied yams may just come true after all!!!

Happy Thanksgiving to those in America. May you have a day filled with love and gratitude.
And to my family: I hope you know I miss you all a lot. I am so thankful for the crazy, beautiful family that I have.

"A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history"

I need You more
More than yesterday
I need You Lord
More than words can say
I need You more
Than ever before
I need You Lord 

More than the air I breathe
More than the song I sing
More than the next heartbeat
More than anything
And Lord as time goes by
I'll be by Your side
Cause I never want to go back
To my old life

Right here in Your presence
Is where I belong
This old broken heart
Has finally found a home
And I'll never be alone

well..I''d cry after a long trip like that too.

a sweet baby girl I had the pleasure of delivering!

fresh produce! Right around the corner from our home.

don't worry! It's just a little vernix (a grease that covers the skin sometimes as birth. Totally normal :) )

doing some more home visits

we had to travel quite a ways to the "countryside" to get to this house. It was a nice change from the normal hustle and bustle of the city.

sweet!

"Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls."

Sometimes the hospital isn't an easy place to be. I am grateful for the many opportunities I have to learn and to work with women and babies and even doctors and nurses, but most of the time this job proves to be a constant roller coaster of emotions.  I love every second of it. But in the midst of celebrating life you have to battle death and there's nothing that can suck the joy out of a person quicker than seeing dead babies on a constant basis. I am learning though that joy cannot be based on your environment or on your circumstances. Joy is a choice. And choosing joy cannot be a temporary choice. The second part of Nehemiah 8:10 says, "Don't be sad, because the joy of the Lord will make you strong." (NCV)  Joy. It's the very nature of who God is. I wonder though, how to find joy in certain circumstances.

A couple weeks ago I finished my shift in the labor room but for some reason I wandered back in (hard to leave a place you really love, I guess.) When I came in I noticed my friend, Maj laboring with a woman. The baby was crowning and the mother was connected to an IV-looking exhausted, sickly, and unable to bear down enough to deliver. She was extremely thin. Maybe 90 pounds and she was full term. I was drawn to the situation because Maj is actually a midwife student back in her hometown in Denmark. I saw that she was doing a delivery and I thought it would be a good opportunity to learn from her.  I guess I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. Maj looked at me slightly concerned, "Are you going to be okay with this?" 

I quickly realized this woman, Padma, who was malnourished, with a severe case of jaundice, and a liver disease would have to fight through her violent pain to deliver a dead baby. 

How do you encourage a weak, sick woman to go through some of the most excruciating pain of her life just to push out a baby who has already died? What do you do in this situation? The student part of me was eager to learn exactly what to do. But the human part of me knew that what this woman needed was to be loved. I came close to her face and looked into her eyes. Death tried to creep in and look back at me. I wish she could have understood english in that moment. While it would have been hard enough to find words in my native language to share with her, it was even more disheartening knowing she had no idea what I was saying to her. Her eyes kept closing and rolling back. I prayed for her. I knew the situation could be more dangerous than just the loss of her baby. What would the trauma of delivering a baby do to her fragile body? After some time of some inconsistent and feeble pushes the lifeless baby boy came out of his mother and severely dangerous amounts of blood immediately followed. Blood splashed onto my legs and drenched my shoes. Maj had to insert the better part of her arm into Padma in order to compress the uterus and control the bleeding. She was postpartum hemorrhaging, which is a severe complication that can follow births. The bleeding wouldn't stop. I wandered how someone so little could produce such an immense amount of blood.

"Will this be the first death of a mother I see?" I thought. 

It can't be. Our prayers became more frevernt. 

I must say, for the very first time I was grateful for the response that came from the doctors and other health care workers at our hospital. They actually got involved. Specialist came in and tried to assist in stopping the hemorrhaging. The woman kept losing consciousnesses and her oxygen intake became severely low.  This situation was overwhelming, but in the moment you just don't have much time to think about it. The family was allowed into the room. I think because the doctors knew she could very well be taking her last breaths at any moment. Padma was hooked up to blood that her family had to provide themselves and bring in. It began to pump into her veins. After around 2 hours of fighting for her life, Padma became more stable. Eventually the bleeding was controlled and began to subside. Maybe it was a miracle? Maybe her life was saved by our prayers, or maybe by the knowledge and understanding of how to treat Postpartum Hemorrhaging that came from the doctors. Maybe a combination of the both? 

This is not really the question that I thought about though. I am grateful that Padma survived. However, I wonder, how could this have been prevented? Why was she so thin and so sick and why hadn't she received any help before her delivery? This whole situation was so unnecessary. I believe that her baby could have lived. I believe she had the right to be cared for. And fed. I believe that someone could have done something. But nothing was done. And I'm not sure who, if anyone, is to blame for that? This woman lost her baby and almost lost her life. I know that God did not intend this incredible gift of life to cause death. And I am here, and I am helping but these types of situations can often arise and try to steal my joy. That is why I know I cannot put my hope in my circumstances. I cannot look for joy in things of the world because I will constantly be robbed of them. But the everlasting joy of the Lord must be my strength. I hope and pray that I can be apart of preventing these types of things from happening. Padma did not lose her life on this day, but many woman in the same situation have. I hope to be apart of seeing preventable maternal deaths become demolished...because we have the ability and capacity to stop them.  

Padma, before she delivered.

just some random photos

just another normal waiting day at the hospital

some more cleaning, labor room walls. The one we scrubbed clean on the left. Right side is what it looked like before.

women laboring on the floor, waiting for a bed to open up

home sweet home...sort of

Part of our job throughout the week is to do “home visits.”  Home visits consist of us trying to contact mothers that we have delivered and somehow, some way communicate with them enough to let them know we want to come visit them at their house. It’s a great way to show the women and their families that we care about them, that they are important enough to see after they have delivered. It also gives us the opportunity to do a check up on them and their baby and give them the time, love, and attention that we all feel they deserve. It always has the potential to be a bit awkward, seeing that neither of us can speak each others language and I am never really sure if they want us there or if they just feel obligated to allow the weird white “doctors” into their homes.

Well last week my team of 4 had the opportunity to visit two different families. We hoped in a rickshaw that made a lot of wrong turns but 45 bumpy minutes later we found a man in a shiny metallic purple shirt waving down our transport so that we could follow his motorcycle down some windy dirt roads into a Hindu neighborhood. I would later come to find out that it was Jothi’s husband. It’s often the husbands who come to find us and bring us back to their home. I like to see the dads, to know that they are involved. I often imagine our moms (meaning the ones we deliver) shooing their husbands away to go and find us. I wonder what that conversation looks like.

Mom: “Husband-go get my white doctor friends.”

Husband: “you have white doctor friends?!?!”

And then she looks at him sardonically and wonders why she has to waste so much time answering his silly questions.

Mom: “of course I have white doctor friends, now they are lost go find them and bring them back to me at once!”

Maybe my imagination gets a bit ahead of me at times? Have you noticed?

(Let me pause for a moment and explain that most of the women here think we are doctors. It’s a bit hard to explain that we are in fact midwives, and we are just students. We definitely do try to clarify it, but with the language barriers it tends to be easier to just go with it.)

When we arrived at Jothi’s (pronounced Jody) house we were warmly welcomed into a room where a “well fed” (like my mom likes to call it) bald man was sleeping on a couch. He woke up to four us just starring at him.  I think he was the uncle or brother-I’m not sure. I am sure though, that never in a million years would he have imagined waking up to four western women sitting next to him when he arises from his normal afternoon slumber. Remember- potential to be awkward at times. We just said hello. Not much more to say in that situation. Jothi eventually came into the room. Is it okay for me to be in love with my moms? She lit up the room. I first connected with her in the hospital a few weeks ago when I approached her bed while she was laboring and asked her how old she was.

“twenty tree. Twenty faw. I done know?” and then she just laughed and begged me not to leave her side while she was contracting. She was full of joy, even in the midst of her pain. She was the same age as me (we both think) and she spoke a little English. How can you not fall in love with that?

It was no different seeing her today. We stumbled over our language barrier but we quickly connected and had a great time. We met the rest of her family, looked at pictures from her wedding, had water and warm milk that I had to pass to someone else when she wasn’t looking. She took out her bangles and put them on all our wrists and then after about an hour we ushered into a different room to enjoy a big meal that her husband went out to get us. The whole afternoon was so much fun. I want to be friends with Jothi. I wish we could hangout and actually talk. I look at her and think we are from such a different world. Not only our cultures but the fact that we are the same age and she is this loving, kind, mother of 2 and housewife and I am… definitely not. We eventually had to part ways because our second home visist was eagerly awaiting our arrival. I hope to see her again.

Jothi

Don't you just have to love her?

Her oldest daughter

baby!

her mother preparing plates for our lunch

eating some rice with our hands

with the hubby!

the whole fam- uncle put a shirt on for the photo!

One family down, one to go. This next visit was interesting. I arrived as a “doctor” and left as an Indian Princess. Is it bad that I don’t mind either of those titles? 
She was so overwhelmed with joy that we would come to her home and spend time with her. Like in any Indian home, snacks and drinks were immediately brought to us. We stuffed  down the food as our stomachs were already filled to the max from Jothi’s meal just an hour beforehand. You can never refuse food and even if you do take food- seconds and often time thirds are always expected from you. Its not the ideal diet plan, but it is an honor to be so well taken care of.  We talked and shared stories and heard about her husband and it didn't take long until the family started playing dress up with us. Just like a little doll, this is how I transformed from a doctor into a princess.

I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking….

You can see- Ingjerd, my teammate is being adorned with a veil and jewelery.

her baby

not my dress, not my jewelery. The loved making me wear it though!

but I will still be glad

¹⁷ "Fig trees may not grow figs,
       and there may be no grapes on the vines.
    There may be no olives growing
       and no food growing in the fields.
    There may be no sheep in the pens
       and no cattle in the barns.
 ¹⁸ But I will still be glad in the Lord;
       I will rejoice in God my Savior.
 ¹⁹ The Lord God is my strength.
       He makes me like a deer that does not stumble
       so I can walk on the steep mountains"

Habakuk 3:17-19