Namaste, Baby!

I saw a surgeon perform a circumcision on Tuesday. A four-year-old boy had an infection that was preventing him from urinating properly. That was hard to watch. He was mostly sedated, but before he was given the shots he cried a terrified cry and his whole body shook and he just looked so scared. He was basically out while they did the surgery, and when it was over a man carried him to recover in the ICU. But anyway, on to today’s stories.

I stood about two feet from the male surgeon as he sliced across a mother’s lower abdomen and cut an opening big enough for a baby.  You prepare yourself for viewing a surgery by expecting the blood and the tissue and the fat, but you don’t necessarily think of the sounds. Like the sound of the scalpel opening the skin and the clamps clenching down on the tissue with a little double clicking noise, and you can almost feel your own skin being clamped. It’s not an easy thing to watch.

He cut through the skin and the belly fat and membrane and made an incision in the uterus. The opening in the abdomen isn’t extremely elastic like the vagina is, and the doctor grabbed each side of the incision and pulled it – ripped it – apart to make it wider. As I watched I could almost feel someone tugging my own belly open, feeling the fingers inside the body cavity and the skin tight and stretching further.

During a c-section the baby doesn’t swim out of its mother like during a vaginal birth. The doctor finds the head and takes both palms around it and pulls it out the opening. He takes a second and finds better grip of the neck and gives a little tug and the rest of the baby follows. Yellow liquid gushed out along with the baby.

The first baby was a girl.

She was pulled out and the doctor grabbed her ankles and held her upside down in one hand and clamped the umbilical cord and then cut it, while she dangled there for a second. At first she wasn’t really crying, but she was looking around with a sour little pout on her face. He dropped her into a metal bin held by a nurse, and the nurse carried her over to the other operating table in the room. The baby girl started to whine and the nurse rubbed her face and began to suction out her nose and mouth with a long, thin tube. Another nurse got brought over a green plastic baby bath and filled it with warm water and a few drops of soap. The nurse rubbing the baby looked at me and smiled. She pointed at me and said “bath?”

So I walked over to the other side of the table and stood in front of the green tub. I couldn’t believe it. I was nervous and excited and it was almost surreal. I was wearing a mask over my nose and mouth and my breathing was hot and moist. I think my eyes were probably wide. The nurse picked up the naked baby and put her in my hands inside the tub. I washed the baby.  She was covered in yellow and white and red. I gently rubbed her skin clean. I held her misshapen head with my left hand and cupped water in my right hand and poured it over her tiny body. I washed a newborn baby in a green plastic tub in an operating room in an incredible hospital in a rural town in India. I washed a newborn baby girl.

The nurse swaddled her in a scrap of orange Indian cloth and handed her back to me. I held her and I looked into her dark brown eyes and I felt how her head smushed back into a funny shape. I whispered to her and told her don’t worry, I was born with a funny head, too. I said “namaste, baby. You’re mommy is going to love you so much.” I looked at her little nails and her little white hands and her little white feet. The nurse flicked her feet a few times, fairly hard, and the baby let out a cry. She handed me a green tube connected to an oxygen tank and showed me how to hold it close to the baby’s nostrils. She smiled and me and pointed to the baby’s face and said “good color!” and put her finger on my forehead and said “same color!”

This was the mother’s second child. Her first had been a normal birth, but this baby was in distress for a period of time, which is why the c-section was done. She was knocked out the whole time. You could see her belly fat through the incision, whitish yellow blobs. The doctor first sewed up the uterus and then the tissue and then sewed the skin up with maybe six thick black stitches. Mommy and baby were taken to the ICU to recuperate.

Then the second mother came in. This was also her second child, and her first had also been a c-section. We watched her get the epidural in her spine.

The doctors did the same procedure that they had just completed on the first mother about fifteen minutes before. This mother groaned a bit during the cutting, and slurred some words of pain when the doctor grabbed her skin with his hands and pulled it apart. Her head occasionally rolled on the operating table.

The second baby was also a girl. She came out covered in white. The doctor also held her by her ankles and cut the cord. He plopped her into the tray, and the nurses took her over to the other table. Anna and Laura washed her and held her.

This baby girl was quieter and sleepy. We tapped her feet every now and then and she’d let out a cry and make the saddest looking frowny face. Her lower lip curled up towards her upper lip and trembled just slightly. Her knees were especially wrinkly and had little rolls of skin around them. Here eyes were shut and the nurse came over with antibacterial ointment. She took two fingers and gently opened the baby’s chubby eyelids just a bit and squeezed the ointment across.

The doctors took the entire uterus out of the woman’s body and rested it on her abdomen. They sewed it up with thick black thread, which will end up dissolving as the body begins to heal itself. He took a full white sack out of her insides and explained that she had an ovarian cyst. He punctured a few holes in it and it spurted clear fluid across the table. He took the scalpel and sliced it open and the assisting surgeon suctioned it up. Then he explained that the mother has had two children now, and expressed interest in tubal ligation to prevent another pregnancy. They tied off the fallopian tubes and then cut them. Then the doctor took her uterus and put it back inside her body, soaked up the extra blood with a white rag, and stitched her up. I looked at the mother. I looked at her tired face and the bangles on her outstretched arms and here feet. Her feet struck me. They were dusty and cracked and callused. Village feet. The village feet of a mother on an operating table in a charity hospital in a rural town in India.

One of the nurses cleaned up the blood around the mother’s legs and the doctors inserted a tube into her vagina and suctioned out a bit of blood. They took a clamp with gauze and also stuck it into her vagina and pulled it out. The nurse took a thin strip of cloth and tied it around the mother’s waist and then took folded cloth and tied one end in the front to the thin strip, and wrapped the cloth between the mothers legs, under the right leg, and tied the other end to the thin strip around her waist in the back.

I held the sleeping baby girl in my arms. She was warm and damp in the cloth and her face was wrinkled up like she knew the real world was too cold and mommy’s uterus was so much nicer and warmer. Anna took her back in her arms and they wheeled the mother to the ICU. A small older woman came in with a bucked and some rags and began to clean up the operating room. We looked around and didn’t know what to do – we still had the baby! The nurse looked at us and smiled and said something in Marathi (the local language here). We asked “should we take her to her mother? To her mother?” and the nurse shook her head yes and laughed.

In the ICU stood some of the family. On the far right the first mother was resting. She had her eyes open but looked quite lethargic. TO the mother’s left was the first baby girl, curled up with a baby IV in a little open incubator with an overhead heater.

To the left of the first baby was the second mother, now resting uncomfortable. A young female doctor in a white sari came over and unsnapped her blouse top and checked her breast for milk. Nothing came out. She walked away and came back with a needle and another woman, from the family I think, held the second baby as the doctor gave an injection. I took a few pictures of the new babies and we left the ICU.

And we came back to the room and I sat down at my computer because I had to write this all down. I washed a newborn baby in a green plastic tub in an operating room in an incredible hospital in a rural town in India.

 Baby Girl #1^

 Baby Girl #1^

            Baby Girl #1^

        Baby Girl #2 ^

Me and baby girl number one :)