Babies and stuff

Yesterday I went on a flight with Mark Spicer, our Director of Ops, to Hukuntsi to pick up two patients and bring them back to Gaborone. Hukuntsi is one of the short, gravel strips that we go into, so is a bit more of a challenge and is a welcome change from the long paved strips at Maun, Francistown and Gaborone. Anyway, the patient that was the main reason for the flight was a maternity case. The mother’s water had broken two days ago and the baby had not yet been delivered, so the doctors expected complications and wanted to get the woman to Gaborone for a C-section. The other patient had a case of gangrene and probably could have been transported by road but took advantage of the space available in the airplane (unfortunately, gangrene brings with it quite a stench that was almost overbearing at times. We only had to deal with it for an hour and a half…the poor man has to live with the embarrassment of that smell all the time.) The flight was going along quite normally, and the few times that I glanced back into the passenger cabin, things seemed quite laid back and quiet…a typical flight. As we neared Gaborone and were getting ready to begin our descent (or maybe we had already begun…I forget now), I happened to glance back again and did a double take. Moagi (one of the paramedics) was bent over, standing up in the aisle and looking down at the bundle of cloth that he was holding in his hands, which was squirming around. I caught a glimpse of a small head peeking out of the top of the bundle and realized that the baby had just been born. I told Mark, and he snapped a few pictures with his camera phone while we descended the rest of the way to Gabs. We landed and the paramedics hurried to get the mother and the other patient into the waiting ambulance and rush the baby off to the hospital. The little boy (he looked tiny, although I’m not sure if he was smaller than normal or not) was having a little difficulty breathing, and Mark helped by holding an oxygen ventilator to his mouth while the paramedics unloaded the other two patients. As he was laying there in the blankets on the ramp by the airplane, the little guy started coughing a little and letting out a few cries in between gulping in air. I’ve never seen a newborn baby like that before, and it was amazing to watch the little miracle of a thing pull in some of his first breaths. And so goes the story of the first baby that was born on a plane that I was flying.