At last, the baby boy was out. No cries were heard. The liquor was darkly stained with meconium and he’s obviously cyanosed.
“Do you want to take a look of your baby?” enquired Dr. Ng in a very nonchalant manner.
The mother shook her head incessantly without demur, her eyes tightly shut. A sign of refusal.
The baby was diagnosed with anencephaly at term, much too late for termination of pregnancy to be carried out. Anencephaly, a developmental defect associated with folic acid deficiency, literally means “no brain”. It refers to a condition in which there’s partial or complete absence of the skull bones, the meninges and the cerebral hemispheres of the brain.
The baby looked grotesque and horrendous. He had a froglike facies. The part of the head above the eyes was completely missing. In addition to shallow orbits and protruded eyes, he had a cleft palate and lip.
He was basically left to die, slowly and agonizingly. Neither suction nor neonatal resuscitation was done, attributable to the fact that anencephaly is known to be incompatible with prolonged extrauterine survival, and most fetuses die within minutes to hours after birth.
It didn't take me very long to notice the presence of respiratory effort, albeit very minimal. He was gasping for air with all his might. The wheezes were clearly audible. I placed the diaphragm of my stethoscope on his chest and did an auscultation. His heart was still beating, very rapidly as a matter of fact. And his lung sounds were abnormal, of course.
Despite the fact that the entire world had given up hope on him, the innocent baby portrayed the unwavering determination and desire of an organism to survive, even under circumstances that don’t allow it to, till it heaves its last breath. That kind of touched my heart.
Giving birth to a baby, an otherwise blissful occasion, turned out to be an awful event to the mother who’d have to bear the immeasurable pain of mourning the death of her beloved child. And I believe that till the day she dies, never will what happened on that particular day be obliterated from her memory.
It's just too sad. Poor mother and baby.
ReplyDeleteIt was just sad to hear that. And how to get good folic acid from food ?
ReplyDeleteFolic acid is not added to flour in your country??
ReplyDeleteDani
I've also seen a newborn with multiple birth defects and truly it was a surreal feeling.
ReplyDeleteI was diagnosed to be just such a baby. 53 years later I am still going strong. I mourn for those who do lose their little ones this way, my friends did recently. But I am here to say, that once in a while one of us escapes unnoticed into the world.
ReplyDelete