A humble young doctor comes to the rescue.

Doctor Aminu Jahun performs life saving surgery on mothers and babies. Read his story here.

The general hospital in Dutse, Jigawa State is noted for free drugs, three-square meals and free surgery for pregnant women. But that is a story for another day.Jigawa is among the states with the lowest number of midwives in the country; thus contributing to high maternal and newborn death rates. In the midst of that, there must be some encouraging number of successful pregnancy deliveries. So I visited the Dutse general hospital to find happy mothers and healthy babies.

My arrival It wasn’t the right time, but my contact, Dr Mahmoud, told me about the feat of a doctor who saved the lives of a mother and her baby, both of whom could have died from many complications. I wanted to meet the doctor, and possibly the mother and her baby.

Wow, is that the doctor? He must be a huge man with a pair of glasses pressing down his nose and grey hair on his head to indicate his many years of experience. But Doctor Aminu Jahun looked as young as his age, 28, with a delicate body frame and a smile that beamed from afar.

“Salaam alaikum”, I greeted and introduced myself, and said, “I learnt of your life-saving surgery.”

“That was nothing unusual,” he said, looking simple and innocent.

“Doctor Mahmoud didn’t see it that way. He felt good about your action to help.  Your sense of urgency - how you ran to ‘borrow’ blood, even though you were not on call. He said the woman, the unborn child or both of them, could have died.”

That got his attention!

“The woman was having abdominal pain and vaginal bleeding. The doctor-on-call was held in the accident and emergency ward and was thus unavailable,” he told me.

He also said while the baby was still inside the womb, the mother’s placenta had separated. In most cases of this nature, the baby dies even before the diagnosis can be made. The mother may also bleed to death.The complication did not end there. The baby was lying obliquely in the mother’s womb; coming shoulder first instead of head first. The doctor said when this happens, the baby could get stuck, and the labour is said to be obstructed.

“Prolonged obstruction would have killed the baby, and mother possibly end up with vesico-vaginal fistula, a ruptured uterus, or both. “Fistula would have led to long term social and medical difficulties like divorce, stigmatisation, social isolation, and so on. If the uterus had ruptured, she would have bled internally and died. In either case, she dies or lives a possibly miserable life,” the doctor explained. Obviously, if she was not taken to the hospital for delivery, any of these could have happened. This is why home delivery is very risky, and should be discouraged.

What did the mother know?

Fatima Yau and her babyFatima did not know what fate hung over her. Of all her complications,The doctor said I would need to be operated; I got so scared. They took me into the theatre and the operation was performed”, was all she remembered.

Reviewing a risky childbirth through the eyes of a doctor reveals that, for the safety of mother and unborn her child, a woman trying to bring forth another life requires nothing but trained birth attendants.

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