Jhpiego doctors in Haiti make the difference in life of newborn
February 5, 2010 at 11:17 pm Leave a comment
The e-mail arrived in Baltimore with the headline: “Emmanuelle bébé precieux.”
Jhpiego’s staff in Haiti had good news to report today. A pregnant woman arrived at the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince with serious complications. She was 37 weeks and bleeding. This was her first pregnancy and she appeared to be about 45 years old.
Dr. Lucito Jeannis, Jhpiego’s Haiti Country Director, and his colleague, Dr. Jean Bernard Fevrier, examined the woman and found that the placenta was lying too close to her cervix– dangerously close. She also had many fibroid tumors in her uterus.The doctors recognized the severity of the situation immediately. “If you don’t do something quickly,” Dr. Jeannis said in a telephone interview today, “the woman is going to die and the baby is going to die.”
The doctors rushed the woman to an operating room that supports the maternity ward, which Jhpiego helped reopen and supply following the recent earthquake. Jeannis and Fevrier, assisted by a Swiss anesthesiologist and a third-year medical resident, delivered by cesarean section a 5-and-a half pound. healthy baby girl. In her first minute of life, the baby scored a personal best: a 9 out of 10 on the APGAR test. She was named Emmanuelle, the French version of the biblical “God is with us.” “Exactly,” says Jeannis. In recounting Thursday’s successful delivery to Jhpiego colleagues in Baltimore, Jeannis signed off his e-mail with two words: Bonne journée.
A good day indeed!
Entry filed under: On the Ground in Haiti. Tags: .
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed