Women and Pains

In order to get to the Maternity ward at the General Hospital in Montero you walk down a corridor past the nurses stand and take a right; rather than a left which takes you to the morgue and a dining hall facility (perhaps an administrator’s oversight?)

The day that I first went to visit Katie at the hospital I was anxious to find her. Katie had been hospitalized the night before because she was spiking fevers and complained of deep bone pain; the diagnosis- Dengue Fever. Dengue Fever is also referred to as bone-breaking disease to give some idea about the level of discomfort. Given the unparalleled amounts of rain this season so far in Montero, the mosquitoes have quite a haven for beloved offspring/little vectors for diseases such as Dengue.

Katie is a tough, so the fact that she was hospitalized made me nervous and eager to find her—which was not hard because nearly everyone was able to tell me what area and what room the “gringa” was in.
Immediately after we found her we were told to leave the room for bug fumigation.

“Bug Fumigation?!” I responded hoping that I’ve heard someone wrong, but sure enough a man with a mask and a fumigation backpack was at the door to be let in. How come HE gets a mask?

“Don’t worry”, the nurse says to me he’s only doing it in the bathroom.

“You can’t fumigate the room of a pregnant woman with Dengue, that’s ridiculous” I say, “I mean you might as well offer her beer, don’t you think that will also help her baby”, I say and immediately realize I am foolish and that I will, from now on, be pegged as Katie’s obnoxious, hot-headed Gringa friend.

We leave the room and walking past the open windows without screens makes me livid that Katie is enduring the discomfort of moving down the hall with her IV bag and later will be exposed to the nasty fumigation smell because of someone’s misguided notion that fumigation is a better solution than putting screens on the windows. We walk down the hall to be herded into the one room at the back of the Maternity Ward, with no fan.

Stepping into the room it felt like slow motion as my naïve eyes grew wide peering around the room at all the women, laid in their cots with new, new babies by their side. What most stuck out to me was the look in their eyes. Their eyes, some of them young were heavy and expressive with a mysterious mix of stern, but calm, suffering and disinterest. And there I was looking on them, probably it was rude, but I was numb with awe for the way these women had all shared this shared experience, suffering and all. And now it looked to have shaped their eyes in the same knowing, heavy way and I had no way to relate to such a thing.

Later in the hall there was another woman with a big, round belly leaning on the brick wall as she walked, breathed out her discomfort in short puffs. “Why is she walking? Why isn’t she in a bed?” I asked my friend María.

“Honey, at that point you don’t want to sit, you don’t want to lie, you just need to walk until the baby starts coming out.” She went on to say that her sister thinks birth is the most natural of things and that she agrees, but that there is nothing natural about the level of a mother suffers to birth her baby.

It’s only recently in working with Katie that I have learned anything about pregnancy: pre-natal pills, folic acid needs, first trimester nausea, urgent food preferences, 8:30 bed times, expansion of pelvic girdle and subsequent pain, etc. I also know that in fourteen weeks gestation period that the pictures of the baby have changed showing that the little bugger has grown from looking like a snake with a short tail to a bird with flappy wings.

It’s never really been in my radar, but it finally seems more relevant when Katie, at 27, is someone that I’ve felt so natural relating with, especially compared with Bolivians. After all with her Midwest upbringing, the same Asics running shoes, study abroad experience in Spain, volunteer with World Teach program in Ecuador (where I am registered to be next September) and when we talk there are too many “I know exactly what you mean” moments for me to not accepting ideas of divine intervention or at least that our meeting is a bizarre, wonderful coincidence.

NOTE: Dad, please know that in this entry is on my ruminations of women and pangs of childbirth which distinct from me being or having immediate desires to be pregnant. Rest assured this is still a long time off.