CHAPTER TEN
‘WILL SOMEONE CALL the doctor again, and tell him this is an emergency?’
Hearing Lisa’s frazzled voice from outside the emergency tukul, Bridget hurried over. It had been a frantic few days since she’d returned to Jukrem camp, her measles vaccination programme a success. And in some respects Bridget had been grateful for the bustle to distract her.
She’d suspected that she wouldn’t see Hayden after that kiss they’d shared a few nights ago, and she hadn’t been wrong. But now
, far from lamenting it, Bridget felt it had been just what she’d needed. She’d still been shaking over the sheer intensity of it up until yesterday. Seeing him could only have made things a hundred times more intense.
‘Can I help?’ Bridget asked, pushing open the plastic screen that served as a door. ‘I can...’
‘Stop.’ Hewa, a local nurse trained by the charity, hurried to the door to block Bridget’s way, but Bridget’s attention was already dropping. Down to the floor and the blood-soaked earth. Then the blood-covered shoes of the nurse.
‘Retained placenta,’ Lisa told her grimly. ‘Baby is okay, she’s over there. But the placenta didn’t come away even though I tried the usual procedures. And then she started haemorrhaging.’
Carefully sidestepping the blood, Bridget made her way to the bed where a young woman, lay, the life literally draining out of her.
She couldn’t focus on that, though. She could only focus on Lisa.
‘Did you run a manual removal?’
‘I tried,’ confirmed Lisa. ‘I ran the usual procedure of sliding my hand in to run the blade of my hand around the uterus... I did it to the letter, Bridget. But it’s stuck fast, she’s still haemorrhaging and there’s nothing I can do.’
‘Is the placenta abnormally deeply embedded?’ Bridget asked.
‘Abnormally,’ Lisa echoed with a nod. ‘Yes.’
‘Okay, so we can’t risk anything more, she’s going to need surgery. Hewa, can you get this girl’s relatives together to see if they can donate blood? Lisa, de-glove and clean up. Then maybe see if you can get a bucket to try to catch some of this blood before it hits the ground. No point having us slipping and sliding as we try to treat the poor woman.’
Usually a birth was a glorious event. But not right now. Not when the beautiful, healthy baby the midwives had just delivered was lying, swaddled but untouched, his mother only metres away, unconscious, and at any moment could need to be resuscitated.
As soon as she could, she would look to get something to clean up the blood that was already all over the delivery room floor. It wasn’t going to help anyone to see it, let alone anything else.
Janet appeared just as Bridget was passing the door. The doctor was sweating in the forty-degree heat and looking like she hadn’t been to bed for days. Bridget knew exactly how she felt.
Being here was utterly demanding, but it was also fulfilling.
‘You radioed me?’
‘Patient with retained placenta. It’s abnormally deeply attached, and our patient began haemorrhaging.’
As Janet entered the delivery room to see her patient, Lisa began to run through her actions to correctly detach the placenta.
‘Okay, so it’s embedded in there,’ Janet confirmed at length. ‘Let’s give her fluids and something to get her blood pressure up before she crashes.’
‘Right,’ Bridget concurred, all too aware that the blood pressure medication was potent.
They were going to have to count the drops to infer infusion rate as it was going to need very careful titration. The sooner she could get donated blood from any suitable relatives, the sooner they could start to reduce this incredibly powerful blood pressure medication. But the fact remained: the placenta was embedded and they didn’t have the means in this camp to get it out.
‘Surgical solution,’ Bridget muttered. ‘Meaning transfer to the main camp at Rejupe?’
‘Only choice,’ concurred Janet. ‘But I’m afraid I heard the heli was on a run elsewhere. And there’s no other way.’
‘What if she could be driven?’
‘The ground is still too unpredictable. Not all the riverbeds are traversable.’
‘And if the army did their bridge-building stuff...? I saw them when we went to the outreach camp. They’re fast and direct. It’s probably this girl’s only chance.’