Womens Lives Saved
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Life Saved, Family Protected
Joseph is from Zambia in Southern Africa. He lives with his wife Hope and their two boys. Joseph is a happy man. Although life can be hard, he is able to provide enough for his family to get by and they have each other.
Joseph’s life came close to being very different when last year, while giving birth to their youngest son, Hope nearly died. Hope went to a basic health care center to deliver. After the birth of a healthy baby boy, she started to hemorrhage and rapidly went into shock.
Luckily, this clinic was one of 25 in the region that is using the LifeWrap. The Safe Motherhood Program has been training local midwives and doctors in prevention and treatment of hemorrhage, including the LifeWrap, in Zambia for almost 4 years. The midwife quickly applied the LifeWrap and Hope began to recover immediately. Thanks to knowledgeable staff and this device, Hope was stabilized and sent to a referral hospital where the cause of her hemorrhage was identified and treated. Hope survived.
Remember the fathers and children who are continuing bravely without their wives and mothers, just as we honor women all over the world who bear the heavy burdens of high maternal mortality.
In Nigeria a woman who gave birth at home arrives at the emergency room bleeding heavily. She has no pulse, no blood pressure, is pale and cold. Her relatives leave and go outside to grieve her death. The doctors in the hospital have just received the LifeWrap, and they place it on the woman. Within two minutes, her eyelids begin to flutter and she begins murmuring. The doctors call to her relatives, "She is alive!" The relatives return and rejoice. They tell her, "You need a new name. From now on you are AYORUNBO, she who has been to heaven and returned!"
“Juana was 23 years old when she gave birth to her second child in the rural clinic in Mexico that I work at. Her labor went well, but after the birth, the placenta would not come out and she started bleeding heavily. Juana quickly became pale and weak and fell into unconsciousness. We had heard about the LifeWrap just weeks before at a community outreach meeting, so we struggled to get Juana in the back of a truck and drove nearly two hours to the nearest secondary level facility. Immediately, staff applied the LifeWrap. As soon as the last section of the garment was on, she stopped bleeding. Juana began to murmur, her eyelashes fluttered, and in five minutes she was awake.” Clinic Midwife, Mexico
Dr. David Nsima worked rapidly to save a mother's life in Nigeria. The young woman, Maryama, was bleeding internally and slipping into shock. Pregnancy-related injuries were causing blood to seep away from her vital organs and pool in her lower body. If Dr. Nsima could not find a way to slow the flow of blood, Maryama's organs could fail and she would die. Just a few months earlier, a woman in her condition at the Katsina General Hospital in Northern Nigeria would not have survived.
On this day, however, Dr.Nsima looked calm, even confident. He and his colleague were able to fit Maryama's lower body into a blue neoprene suit known as the LifeWrap. Because of this garment, Maryama's life, as well as the lives of many others, has been saved.