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I nearly died after giving birth

Health
 Photo:Courtesy

When you are about to die, you can feel life draining out of you. Your eyes lose focus and your limbs can barely move. It is almost useless to even try fighting it — that damn dying feeling. And when everything becomes all hazy, there is a certain zeal that kicks in; the urgent desire to live, and for about a minuscule minute it helps you to fight that floating and drifting feeling.

And when no help arrives, your mind takes over and resolves to accept the inevitable. It’s a horrible feeling and all the things you haven’t done or haven’t said to the people you love become so evident that you want to cry. You want to shout out loud and say, “I am not done with living damn it!”

But you cannot, because you can feel the blood leaving your body at an alarming rate....it actually gushes out and the first place to feel the cold is the head, and then all consciousness is lost.

That was me. Four months ago. I walked into hospital ready to have my third child and I almost didn’t walk out alive. At 3am, in the recovery room post-delivery, I was fighting to reach the nurse’s buzzer button, which lay on the bed right next to my head. But I couldn’t. I had woken up feeling weak and wet. I knew what all that wetness meant and I knew I had to call for help, but I couldn’t lift a finger and for the first time in my life, my big mouth failed me.

And so on that bed, feeling my life draining out of me, and with no one by my side, since I sent them all home to sleep, I told God that I wanted to see my people and my children again, then lost conciousness. I was lucky a nurse found me soon afterwards. But a couple of months later, a friend would not be as lucky.

It was on the day the Beyond Zero Campaign, headed by the First Lady Margaret Kenyatta, kicked off their maiden Half-Marathon to help reduce and even curb maternal deaths in the country. A sunny and promising day it was, and as the athletes took to their heels on the hot tarmac, an old friend was fighting for her life and that of her unborn child in hospital.

Did you know that about 5,500 women die each year in Kenya due to pregnancy-related complications? (source World Health Organisation, WHO). That day, my dear friend became a statistic.

And in the two weeks that followed her sudden death, about four other cases were reported on various social media forums where other women and mothers had lost friends or relatives during childbirth. These were, however, not women who did not have proper access to medical facilities. They are not the ones captured within the WHO spectra of statistics where they clearly state that their data is mainly drawn from rural areas and people living in poverty. These were middle-class women, with insurance covers or enough money to pay a bill at any high-end hospital in the city.

Currently, the number one cause of the death amongst the middle and upper spectra of the society during childbirth is Post-Partum Hemorrhage or PPH otherwise known as severe bleeding after childbirth. It is more prevalent in women who have undergone Vaginal delivery (VD) and often occurs during the period doctors refer to as “the Golden Hour.”

During this period, according to Dr Njoki Fernandes, a gynecologist from AAR says, “a woman who has had VD, should be under the ever watchful eye of the nurse and checked on vitals (blood pressure, pulse and bleeding) at least every 15 minutes. It is in this window period that if an abnormal bleeding should occur, the nurse on duty should catch it early enough for the doctor to be able to save the patient’s life. It is also during this period, however, that most mums (especially second time mothers) will find themselves alone and not attended to because being a seasoned mom, everyone believes the worst is over and the mother should be left to rest. This should not be the case.”

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