“She has five children.”
“What?” I had completely zoned out. “Five children?” I glanced at the health record in my hands. “But when I screened her in Kandi she told me she has eight children. Eight pregnancies, eight deliveries, and eight living children. That was only three months ago.”
Esther, my fellow team member and translator, raised her eyebrows and looked at me like a dense student. “I know, but I am telling you what she says now. She has five children.”
“Did the other three die?”
“No,” Esther shook her head with finality. “She had seven pregnancies, two died, and now she has five children that remain.”
Deep breath. I straightened my back, engaging my dormant muscles. From what I could tell my arse had sunk through the limp cushion on my stool. Pretty sure we’re touching metal now. Nevermind the pressure ulcer forming. Focus.
“Okay, let’s keep going. Can you ask her which year she had the pregnancies and how they resulted? You know, vaginal or cesarean or abortion or miscarriage?”
Esther got to work while I changed the patient’s recorded pregnancies. As a western nurse, obtaining the obstetric history of a woman from northern Benin is exhausting because the cultural clash is so tangible. Sure, my college education taught me about cultural differences, but did those classroom lessons warn me that sometimes I would want to bang my head against the wall? No.
After about ten minutes Esther handed me her sheet of paper. “Finished.”
I skimmed the information. “This is good,” I said slowly, my eyes absorbing the numbers. Long screening days and broken air conditioning make for slow mental processing. “The numbers add up!” I gave Esther and the patient a high five.
“This might not go over well but…when was her last menstruation?” I asked tentatively.
Esther spoke with the patient then turned back to me. “She is not sure. Before the last moon.”
Well, at least we tried.
I nearly responded, “that doesn’t make sense,” an expression so frequently used over the four weeks of Women’s Health screening that it acted as my sidekick, or at the very least a desperate plea for the information to obediently oblige to my nursing framework. The better response would be, “that doesn’t make sense to me.” My patient’s system of moons and stars does make sense….to her.
I can confidently say that Women’s Health screening this spring exposed me to more than I could have imagined. I shamelessly cried as women relived their nightmarish histories, gripped patients’ hands during painful examinations, repeated myself hundreds of times, and handed out more pads than a middle school gym teacher.
Needless to say, I am exhausted and definitely don’t have the desire to birth children anytime soon (meaning 0% to all the statisticians reading this).
But the tough weeks were worth the effort, acting like growing pains that ultimately yielded something good. Women who once leaked urine are now healed, the dryness restoring dignity. Some women we couldn’t help, but I hope that they received emotional healing from the safe space we created during the screenings. Even if we cannot heal, we listen. Sometimes that makes all the difference.
International Women’s Day was a special day that we listened and danced in order to celebrate our patients. The beauty of women’s day, particularly this past one, is that women from thousands of miles away gathered together in mutual song and dance. We adorned ourselves with bold fabric and bright lippy and flailed our shoulders and hips to a shared beat. We could so easily have been each other. I could have been the spirited woman from the bush. She could have been the gangly short-haired nurse. I didn’t care about our communication difficulties. We celebrated because we are equally and abundantly fabulous.
From now on when I remember the difficult weeks of Women’s Health screening the most prominent memories will be the celebrations, both for IWD and healing through surgery. Those lively hours serve as a purposeful reminder of how similar we actually are. It is okay that we use different systems and forget how many pregnancies we’ve had. It is perfectly acceptable to mourn the loss of a child decades after the death. It is wise to value children and to advocate for our bodies.
At the end of the day the aspects that don’t matter are the brief frustrations and fleeting impatience, scratched out medical charts and sore muscles. What matters is that we are all walking a journey, at times together and sometimes separately, but together we are walking.
And, more importantly, we’re going somewhere.
Photo by Timmy Baskerville
six feet & growing 