Thursday, April 22, 2010

New Life

Each morning the medical teams at the Adventist Hospital
meet for a brief meeting.... an inspirational message for the day.
These meetings are held on the front steps of the hospital.
Tuesday's morning meeting was quite eventful for Jack.
Instead of attending the meeting,
he delivered a baby...
his first ever.

He tells the story that during his med school and residency,
he traded his delivery room time for another option...
any option.
Delivering babies was not his thing...and never would be
if life went according to plan.

Obviously, Haiti, thought otherwise.

As luck would have it, a young man grabbed Jack 
that morning saying in his very broken English
"Woman - discharge" over and over.

Somehow Jack figured out that the discharge
that he was talking about was probably a baby.

Off he ran to the OB clinic....just in time to catch
a beautiful baby girl.

Nice catch, Jack!!

From what I could gather, there is no
prenatal care in Haiti.

There is a fairly high infant mortality rate compared to the US.

And with no childhood immunizations,
many children get polio and other
childhood diseases that are no longer a threat
in our country...not to mention typhus and malaria.

In this world of ours, with medical technology,
there seems no excuse for children succumbing to
preventable disease.  Somehow, we have to extend
this treatment to all the children of the world.

2 comments:

Cathy said...

Tears again Bev...........hope they named her Jacqueline, Jackie for short.

Unknown said...

Wow, what an incredible experience! How did he feel?