STUDENT DIARIES
Sierra Leone,
West Africa
I clutched my stethoscope and a pair of gloves in one hand
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and gripped the door handle of the Land Cruiser with the other. The makeshift ambulance tore down a washed-out dirt road at breakneck speed, as the medical technician and I raced toward a tiny village in the Sella Limba Chiefdom of Sierra Leone, West Africa. Early that morning, we had received a call from a borrowed cell phone that a pregnant woman was having
Story by
KATIE BRUNNER
seizures at a remote midwifery clinic, unstaffed due to a lack of qualified providers. We arrived to find the entire population of the village congregating outside of the clinic, while the tribal shaman attempted to console the patient’s husband inside. I found the patient lying on a cot, listless and barely conscious. She appeared to be at full-term in her pregnancy and had not yet begun labor. The patient’s family, initially suspicious of assistance from an American woman, finally agreed to let me help, so we loaded the patient and her entire extended family into the back of the Land Cruiser and sped to the hospital for an
A baby’s first cry is the best sound on Earth no matter what country I’m in.
emergency cesarean section. I knew I was falling in love with obstetrics during my core third year OB/GYN rotation. I was scrubbed in for my first delivery, a twin cesarean section, when I realized I had gotten so excited that I was completely forgetting to breathe. But it was in Africa that I ultimately decided to become an obstetrician/ gynecologist. I spent a month at Kamakwie Wesleyan Hospital in Sierra Leone on what
WVSOM MAGAZINE
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SUMMER 2013
13
