‘I delivered babies in horrific war zones - but lost my own firstborn’
20.05.2022 - 09:49
/ ok.co.uk
NHS midwife Anna Kent’s life has been changed as a result of her humanitarian work. Here, the 41-year-old - who lives in Weymouth with daughter Aisha, six - opens up to OK! about helping others and suffering her own tragedy. "It’s 2007 in South Sudan.
A 16-year-old girl named Grace* is whisked to theatre. She has just delivered triplets naturally – something almost unheard of in the UK. Her thin legs stick outwards as I shuffle alongside, my fist in her birth canal to stop her bleeding to death.
An hour later, Grace emerges from surgery after a complete hysterectomy. I watch her walk home in the blistering 50°C heat with a basket of woolly hatted triplets balanced on her head. She’ll never bear children again.
I saved Grace and her babies – but I can’t save them all. I remember being a small child in the 1980s and watching in shock as TV footage showed starving Ethiopians. It was the first time I realised how much suffering there was in the world.Then, when I was 18, my brother’s girlfriend was murdered.
I was a nursing student – young, scared and traumatised. I hadn’t been able to help her, but through nursing I was determined to help other vulnerable women and make a difference. Eight years later, with a master’s degree in nursing and three years of experience as an emergency department nurse at Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, I flew to conflict-torn South Sudan with the humanitarian medical group Médecins Sans Frontières.The first patient I saw was a woman with dull and waxy skin, her eyes rolling back in their sockets.
Her unborn baby had died and we had to get it out, or she would die too. I never knew whether she survived. I had a boyfriend back home called Jack.
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