Lillian Wanja Kung’u, 29, woke up in the wee hours to a chill in the air. It was not the usual early morning chill. It felt as if her bedroom had been hit by a cold snap. She wobbled out of bed, changed into her warmest nightdress, and wore her heaviest coat over it.
She went back to bed, but the freezing would not stop.
“Then I started feeling a creeping backache. It was like a phantom. It came and went, and I couldn’t tell whether it was in the spine or the muscles,” she recalls. “At some point, I thought, ‘this is not normal. Maybe I should go to hospital,’” she recalls.
Then she decided to wait it out at home. After all, she says, aren’t expectant women often taken to hospital and then turned away because it was a false alarm?
But as she tried to soothe her discomfort and catch some sleep, she started feeling as though she had a running stomach. She got out of bed twice in 10 minutes to visit the toilet.
As she crept out of bed the third time, her water broke. “That is when it occurred to me… oh my God! The baby is coming,” she exclaims, her face looking surprised and bemused. This new 29-year-old mother is still amazed at the events of that morning.
TRYING NOT TO PANIC
She continues: “I was half-standing and half-squatting. A push later… and out pops the baby. At that moment, naturally, I had to gather all my wits to be in charge of what was happening.
“I held the baby’s head, positioning him properly so that he would lie on my palms. I told myself, ‘I am having this baby right now’,” she explains. “The baby was coming and I needed to hold it, and not panic.”
At that moment, she says, the thought that anything might go wrong never even crossed her mind.
“I never thought I needed to sit down and call someone. No! My thoughts were that this needs to happen right now.
“When I saw that the baby was finally out and he was making those squirmy noises… that’s when it really hit me that I was holding my own baby — the baby I had just birthed myself. I didn’t even check to see its gender.”
A frisson of surprise shot through her and she screamed for her mother, who was asleep in the next room.
Apparently, the commotion of the birth had not even woken up her mother, the only other person in the house. She ran into the room to find Lillian gingerly holding the baby, who was later named Judah Christopher, in her palms. In shock, she started rambling incoherently, recalls Lillian, whose efforts to calm her down failed.
She had lost the presence of mind to know what to do to help her daughter.
PANIC AND CONFUSION
“I told her where I had put the scissors and showed her where to cut the cord and how to tie it. “After confirming that the baby was warmly wrapped, I just fainted,” Lillian recollects. Although her mother kept telling her to push to expel the placenta, she says she did not feel the urge to push, but it did discharge in a few minutes.
Even in her state, Lillian continued giving instructions. “I told her ‘take the baby to the car and then come back for me.”
She lets out a hearty laugh before saying: “It was more comical than I can narrate because my mother was praying… and rambling while roaming around the room. Meanwhile, every time I would regain consciousness, I would just start laughing, she was more confused than I was. First, when she put the baby on the bed, he started peeing and she exclaimed, ‘Ngai..Ngai..Ngai… wooi mae maraumako…mae maraumako?’ (Oh my God! Oh my God! Where is the water coming from?).
“So she runs to the bathroom to get water and I tell her, ‘We need to be going to the hospital, Mum! The baby is not dirty,’” she chuckles.
Eventually, her mother carried her to the car and took mother and baby to Neema Hospital just before 6am, where they were both given a clean bill of health. The baby weighed 3.1kg. They performed an evacuation of the uterus and kept her overnight for observation.
“We had been taught this stuff. When you go for pre-natal clinic in low-income areas, they show you these things. I was taught all this at AMART mission clinic in Kangemi, where I had been going for ante-natal care. I never once went to a high-end gynaecologist. There, they tell you to always carry a razor, leso, and baby’s necessities with you. They also tell you not to travel long distances unaccompanied. They teach you the basics. They also tell you what to do in case of an emergency. But when you go to a gynaecologist, they’ll tell you things like when you feel this and that, call me… or go to hospital and I will find you there.
“So I had it at the back of my mind and I used to carry all that stuff with me,” she says.
Childbirth is now a business.
Right from the beginning, Lillian, an actuary with a well-paying job and still enjoying the support of her parents with whom she was staying at Kahawa West during the last days of her pregnancy, had chosen to go against the grain.
She says she is concerned about how commercialised childbirth has become in Kenya. Hers was a step of faith.
“How many people can say they successfully birthed their own babies… following only their own instincts?” she muses, brimming with pride and a real sense of accomplishment. She says she did not have a designated gynaecologist, as has become the custom with many urban women.
Lillian had done everything naturally right from the beginning, avoiding ultra-sound scans.
At AMART clinic, all they did was feel the position of the baby with their bare hands. In fact, it was not until her last visit that her attendant at the clinic told her that the baby was in a breech position, and so a scan was necessary. It discounted the diagnosis, showing that the baby was in the right position, to Lillian’s relief.
“From the scan, I was told, the baby was really low and engaged,” she recalls. But even in hindsight, Lillian says she cannot recall any clues that the baby was about to arrive. After the scan, she had been advised that the baby was not due until after two weeks. The due date had previously been scheduled two days later, on June 22, 2013.
The new mother believes hers was the best birth and hopes to do the same with her other deliveries. She reckons that childbirth should be completely natural and that what is required is a relaxed mother who allows her body do the work without having to suffer the “terrible experience in most hospitals, where there is a lot of unnecessary shouting and sometimes abuse directed at the mother, making the birthing experience a nasty one for many women.”
Modernity has changed the way childbirth is viewed, but Lillian believes that many women are robbed of the birthing experience by the commercialisation of obstetrics.
She wishes that it could be stripped back to a simpler and more natural experience. “When you think about it, all this makes a lot of sense. Pregnancy is not a disease, nor is childbirth a medical emergency,” she argues.
But how many other mothers would imagine following through with something like this just to give their baby the opportunity to enter the world at home during a “normal” and non-medical birth?
Most women can give birth perfectly well on their own without interference. Of course, some need a Caesarean section, some need extra medical care, but most do not.
CHANGING TRENDS
In fact, the trend in the UK and the US is to have home deliveries, says Dr Wanyoike Gichuhi, and obstetrician-gynaecologist. However, that would be impossible in the Kenyan setup because of infrastructure hurdles, he observes.
“What they are doing is having a midwife in attendance during the anticipated period. It works there because they have a very good backup system where their road network and ambulance services are efficient. The ambulance takes just a few minutes to arrive after you call 911 and get you to hospital quickly in case of an emergency. But can we afford that in Africa?” he asks.
In case of a home delivery, he warns, “Never pull the placenta because it will shear off and remain inside. Wait for the placenta. Usually when there is a gush of blood… most likely the placenta has detached itself, then you can pull it gently using upward and downward movements.”
Dr Gichuhi emphasises that even after such a birth, the mother and baby still need to go to hospital and are likely to spend the night there. It is at this time that the baby is given the first immunisation.
- Daily Nation
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