A view of Obstetrics

Having a family is exciting! Maybe not all beer & skittles but fantastic!

Modern obstetric care in the ‘so called’ first world countries is on the whole excellent. In quoting statistics one must remember the old adage ‘lies, damn lies and statistics’. The internet tells us that in the best countries the maternal mortality rate is 2/100,000 live births. In Ethiopia it is 421/100,000 live births, and I’m sure that it was worse 50 years ago. Around the world there is apparently an obstetric tragedy every 11 seconds. I cannot find figures for maternal deaths when the baby is born dead. That is the world I entered in 1968. This doesn’t include those who live with vesico-vaginal fistulae, of which there are 9,000 new cases annually in Ethiopia (quoted by the late Dr. Catherine Hamlin); nor those who survive ruptured uterus. I’m sure many of these died before they reached a hospital where they could be operated on.

I took out the figures in Soddo (my second long stay in Ethiopia) over a year period and we had a 95% survival rate of those who reached hospital alive. I had reopened the hospital in Soddo in 1993 after the country was freed from the communist era. I was the only surgeon there.  I was on call 24/7. After a while we had an obstetrician there who did the day O&G work and was on call at night every second week for obstetric emergencies. But initially I did them all , and later out-of-hours cases every second week. I was also called in to deal with the situation if there was also a ruptured bladder, which occurs in about 10% of cases.

I shall only mention one case here, as I know medicine isn’t everyone’s ‘cup of tea’. My children say they were brought up on such things around the tea table.

In the countryside antenatal care was almost non existent. We ran such a clinic, but few attended and everyone was so busy we didn’t chase things up as hard as we ideally should have done. Most babies were delivered at home. People didn’t come to the hospital until things were obviously seriously wrong. If you lived, for instance, 50km from the hospital, for the majority, there were neither ambulances nor roads so they had to be carried on stretchers over mountainous tracks and crossing waterways. People were frightened to travel at night; and it took, I am told, above 20 people to carry the patient, sharing the work; so it is not surprising that people arrived late.

My first case of ruptured uterus came within a few days of my arriving on my first time in Ethiopia. I was the only doctor in the place. The story apparently was that the labour made no progress, so the native healer tried to do what we call an internal podalic version. In other words by putting his/her hand inside the uterus they intended to turn the baby to get the feet at the bottom so that they could have something to hold onto to attempt to pull the baby out. I don’t know how but whoever it was managed to tear up the front of the vagina and uterus as well as the back of the bladder from top to bottom, and they still could not deliver the baby. The patient obviously rapidly became much sicker and she was brought into the hospital. The baby was dead, but I repaired the long internal tears and she recovered.

Unfortunately she developed a small fistula for which she was sent to the ‘Hospital by the River’ in Addis. She did well and was later delivered of a healthy child. I’m not sure where she fits into the statistics. Later when I was met with both a bladder as well as a uterine tear I used to bring down some mobilised omentum to separate the uterus and the bladder.