Oops, I forgot something...

I forgot to tell you all about the pregnant lady who came to the clinic last week with her husband. She was eight months plus some days pregnant with a child. It was not her first, there were several other children but I don't know if they were all hers. This man is 40 yrs old and has already lost one wife. This was his second wife and she was 30 yrs old. Her complaint was that she had been bleeding for eight days and sometimes she would bleed so much she would become unconscious. She was not dilated enough to have the baby so we sent her home with some iron and multivitamins, etc... Keith was planning on going to Port-au-Prince the next day so he would pick her up on his way down and take her to a hospital. Several hours later the man was back at our gate saying that when he was on the way home his wife was riding on their mule when she suddenly fell off unconscious, probably from lack of blood. We told him to get her and bring her back to the clinic and we would see what we could do. Some neighbors who had seen her fall helped him get her back on the mule and to the clinic. We put in an IV and started some fluids then checked out the bleeding. It was pretty severe and she still was not ready to have the baby. We have a Doppler and tried to locate the baby's heartbeat but couldn't. This lady needed a c-section, right away! But we are a three hour drive away from a hospital on very bumpy roads and Mardi Gras was that day so we knew even if we could keep her alive long enough to get her down the mountain we probably would be unable to get her to a hospital because of all the people and traffic. We have pitocin but were afraid to use it because that would probably make this lady bleed out even faster. There was nothing we could do except give her iv fluids. Over the course of several hours she got 5 liters of fluid and was still bleeding badly. She wasn't even having contractions. We don't know for sure what the matter was... Possibly abruption??? She just needed that baby out and somebody to figure out why she was bleeding so badly. By now it was getting late in the evening and we are not set up to keep patients overnight yet so what would be the plan for the night? These people were from a long ways away and this lady probably wouldn't make it through the night. If she was alive in the morning we would definitely take her down but the bleeding wasn't even slowing down that we could tell. We found someone just up the street who would let them have a room for the night so we put the lady on a stretcher and gave them some blankets. In this dark, crude  room lit only by a flashlight Keith asked the man if they were Christians. (The lady was not conscious ) He said they were Catholics but really weren't Christians but his wife had told him earlier that day that they needed to find something more. Keith had a prayer with them and we left them for the night.
    In the morning the lady was no longer alive...