MERRY CHRISTMAS TEAM MATERNAL AND CHILD HEALTH!

One of the consistent highlights of Christmas day news on the networks is the many Christmas babies born across the hospitals. The news clips and newspaper pictures evoke a warm fuzzy feeling across the country as we draw humor from all the hilarious names the newborns are given.

Behind the scenes however, there are thousands of dedicated people across the country who are at work to make the scenes in these clips happen. As the year draws to a close and we give thanks for good health, let us take time to celebrate these heroes and heroines who make Christmas a whole lot warmer for most families.

The top honor goes to midwives. These are women and yes, men of valor, armed with a pair of gloves and a big heart. They are the frontline in the welcome committee tasked with receiving the little bundles of joy as they make their entrance into this world. They exist on a duty rota in the hospitals, that has no regard for their personal lives. They are on call in the delivery rooms when other parents are singing Christmas carols in church on Christmas eve with their children.

When I think of midwives, I always remember a fine one who taught me my first delivery. I was in my first year of medical school almost 17 years ago. She worked at the Health Centre in Naitiri, Bungoma County, delivering mothers, day in day out as they came. It never mattered the day of the week or season. She lived and worked among her own people and it is all she had done for years. She didn’t know any other life. Her children had grown and left home and she didn’t seem to have noticed that as she had a new one every other day in her little delivery room. She may not have founded facebook or discovered a cure for zika virus but in my book, her consistency wins her many awards.

In my book, the medical officer and clinical officer interns come in a close second. After qualifying as doctors and clinical officers, they think they finally have a break from the grueling school curriculum. That is until they land in the maternity rotation during the holiday season. Many have left work on the morning of 26^th December and wondered why the streets are empty. They have worked so hard, they forgot it was Christmas.

One more night shift from hell, battling to save a mother’s life. Standing in the operating room with your seniors for four straight hours when you thought you would go in to deliver a baby and end up elbow-deep in blood because the abused uterus won’t stop pouring. The poor mother has been in labor for over 48 hours at home in remote North Eastern Kenya, she comes with severely low blood levels, the blood bank has no O-negative blood (her blood type which happens to be preciously rare) at her nearest hospital and the patient has to be airlifted to Nairobi to stand a chance to live. Only after she is settled in the intensive care unit with a steady hum of the monitors does the poor intern doctor realize his scrubs are soaking wet with sweat from the unrecognized terror of knowing how close they came to losing a patient.

The “invisible people” in the maternity unit come a close third. These are people without whom these units would not run. Yet we obnoxiously ignore them and completely under-recognize their massive contribution to the sanity of the units. A joke is told of how the body organs once got into a supremacy battle over who was the most important. As the brain, the heart and the lungs went on about how critical their roles were in keeping things running, the anus quietly shut down without a fuss. As time went by, everyone realized that if it did not open up and let out the waste, they were all going to die.

This analogy plays very well in this scenario. How many people truly remember the name of the cleaning lady who shows up with a mop in the delivery suite to clean up the floor after a particularly bloody delivery? Or to mop the bedside when the laboring mom throws up unexpectedly after a particularly protracted contraction? How many of us even know how the plumber looks like yet one blockage in the sluice room where all soiled hospital linen and instruments pass through for decontamination can lead to a total shut down of the entire unit. What of those who spend sleepless nights in the central sterilization units folding up gauze pieces and talking to machines as the sterilizing units continue humming at searing temperatures next to them?

These are the parents who may not even be able to describe their jobs to their children when they get home. These are the moms who cannot even say hello to their babies before taking a shower when they get home for fear of spreading any hospital-acquired infections to their little ones. They are no lesser beings at appreciating that holiday seasons are for family but they give it all up to spend the nights being invisible so our babies can be safe from infection when they come into this world.

Obstetricians are possibly a hard nut to crack. One goes through medical school for six years, gets exposed to the world of practice for two more years and still goes ahead to consciously commit themselves to the crazy sentence of obstetrics. This doesn’t make sense to our own children but that is who we are. Babies will never send notice of when they intend to be born. As an obstetrician/gynaecologist, you make a choice to be subject to these little unborn ones who give you orders even before you know how they even look like. To my sixty-year old colleagues who get out of bed at three o’clock in the night to save a baby’s life or to ensure that the newborn is not orphaned at birth, I salute you! Happy holidays to all the maternal and child health team members wherever you are in the world!