Today is my last full day at the hospital, and I am giving a second training on “Helping Babies Breathe,” a class for safe resuscitation of newborns. The class is appropriate for an American audience but is also appropriate for many other parts of the world. The basis of the class is that a couple of fairly easy interventions- setting the baby directly against mom’s skin at the time of delivery, and use of a bag valve mask device (ambu bag) when needed can save 50% of the newborns who currently die. It’s easy to teach, interactive, and fun. We leave a kit with the students so they can in turn teach another audience of nurses, midwives, or physicians.
I’ve got an audience of about eight nurses. My interpreter is an intern named Anna. All of us are standing around the table, and I’m demonstrating the equipment that I will be leaving with them, the washable and reusable ambu bag and the handheld suction device, the teaching kit as well. Suddenly, a nurse who brought her infant to the class shouts, “There’s a cobra on the floor!” I look down at my feet. A small creature, like a large millipede lies coiled up just two inches behind the place where I was just standing. Everyone jumps back. I don’t know what to do, but obviously the lecture is over unless I dispose of the creature somehow. I grab the thick plastic ziplock bag that accompanies the teaching kit and wrap it gingerly around the animal’s body, still not certain what it is. The crowd gasps and shouts their concerns for my safety. I carry it outside, all seven inches of it, and place it on the ground. It’s tiny head emerges from the coils. Sure enough, it’s a small dark colored snake. People are shouting at me to move back. A nurse grabs a flat stone and throws it at the fearsome beast from a safe distance of eight feet, striking it on the back. In a few minutes, the dangerous episode is over, and we go back to saving lives.
The students are eager, interested and engaged. They all appreciate learning about the use of the ambu bag, and they are able to demonstrate competency. We discuss some of the challenges we see here. Obstetrical injuries. Transportation challenges. Fistulas. Newborn resuscitation, lack of equipment, lack of training. I hand them the “Helping Babies Breathe” kit, for which they are grateful. At the end of the lecture, I tell them the story of the resuscitation of twins whose mother had placenta previa and had been bleeding all night, how we used the ambu bag to raise the pH in their blood so that the brain and heart could wake up. Both had no signs of life when they were born. One of the nurses remarked, “when a baby like that is born at the general hospital, the baby is simply set aside and left to die.” That’s why I told you that story, I reply. I want you to see that there is a way to successfully resuscitate babies. You can save lives with this technique.
I assist on a couple of surgical cases in the afternoon. The day is winding down, and as it happens, a couple of the medical interns are in the room where I am hanging up my coat for the last time and putting my stethoscope away. “Dr. Barry, I heard that this is your last day,” begins Ilda. Yes, I smile. “We hardly got to know you.” She sits down alongside Anna. They study me, want to know something more of where I come from, my family, my work. I brag about my wife, and tell them about our children, about our work in Kenya and Ethiopia, remodeling homes and training homeless men in Colville, developing housing for people in Colville, working at the clinic for people who struggle to access healthcare. Of the incredible life I am living, how grateful I am for this life, that I can’t imagine retiring as long as my mind is good and I have my health. They tell me of the challenges they have witnessed, the lack of health insurance for the great majority of folks, the extremely wealthy people in their country, the lack of distribution of that wealth, the lack of accountability, the struggles of honest people as inflation drowns their static salaries and makes them paupers. I wish we had more time. It’s clear that they do too. There is something that happens when you connect with people who genuinely understand what it means to respond in compassion to the suffering we see. Those are always special people. We’re drawn to each other. We say our goodbyes and hope that there may be another chance to work together.
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