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GinaLagomarsino
Reposted from Devex.com. Original article by Priya Agrawal and Gina Lagomarsino
One day in September, in a small town north of Kampala in Uganda, a young woman, pregnant with twins and still weeks away from full term, arrived at the Maria Maternity Ward, a private clinic. Her cervix was already 8 centimeters dilated. The babies were coming.
Midwife Mary Gorret Musoke knew what to do. She monitored her patient’s blood pressure and prepared her for the premature delivery. She called a doctor she knew, who gave her some advice on how to give the imminent newborns and their underdeveloped lungs a fighting chance.
“The babies came,” Musoke recalls with a smile, “and I did the kangaroo wrap — one with the mother, one with the father.”
Today, all are healthy and thriving.
The case could have gone very differently. The mother could have attempted to deliver at home, a risky proposition that remains far too common in this part of the world. She could have set out for the public district hospital in the city much farther away, a facility Musoke, who used to work there, says is so overcrowded and understaffed at times that many women end up delivering alone on the floor. Instead, she chose “Mama Maria.”
Photo: ©PACE - Midwife Mary Gorret Musoke assisting one of her patients during an ultrasound scan at her private clinic, located in the Wakiso district, north of Kampala, Uganda.
