The doctors at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City are justifiably proud of their maternity unit. Their facilities may not be the most modern, but more than a thousand babies are born here every month. Women not only give birth in a sanitary and safe environment, but also benefit from both ante-natal and pre-natal treatment programmes.
Head of the Unit, Dr Akram El Shikhalil, gives IR a guided tour of what he calls the reception area. The delivery suites are on the second floor. Blue painted doors lead off a central corridor into small, separate rooms equipped with two or three beds. It’s here that women are scanned throughout their pregnancy, doctors listen to the baby’s heartbeats, there’s an emergency room and a miscarriage suite. The latter is a sad yet necessary component of any functioning maternity unit. Dr Akram tells us it has been in use more than usual in recent weeks.
“During the war, pregnant women like anyone, suffered soaring anxiety”, he explains. “This caused a notable increase in the number of women who spontaneously aborted or gave birth prematurely. The neo-natal death figure has doubled in recent weeks. Babies are being born at 22 and 23 weeks. This is too early to survive here.”
Stress
Dr Akram says he’s also seen an increase in cases of post partum haemorrhaging resulting from a rise in blood pressure, likely caused by stress
Risks for pregnant women were exaggerated because most were unable to reach a hospital either for ante-natal care or when they went into labour. Staffing levels at the unit ran at 10% because it was too dangerous for people to cross the city to work during the attacks.
Born early
In the special care baby unit Dr Akram points to a line of incubators which, on closer inspection, turn out to house tiny, wriggling bodies attached to breathing tubes and sporting seemingly giant sized nappies. The babies in this room were all born early, during the war.
Dr Akram’s colleague – Obstetrics and Gynaecological doctor Hossein Ghalayini - was one of those who continued to work in the unit throughout the attacks.
He describes receiving one woman aged in her early thirties, during a night of heavy shelling.
“She was brought from Zaytoon in an ambulance, bleeding heavily and very, very scared. She was crying out that she didn’t know where her baby was”.
The woman had given birth as her home collapsed around her as bombs fell on Zaytoon Square. In the chaos that followed, she was bundled into an ambulance but, semi-conscious, shocked and in terrible pain had no idea what had happened to her baby.
Dr Ghalayini says he and his colleagues were able to save the woman, but he doesn’t know if she found her baby. Dr Akram says this is not the only case of women being separated from their newborns after giving birth during an attack.
“Some babies were found in the rubble, some alive, some dead”.
Injured
During the worst of the attacks he says he treated several women who had given birth and been seriously injured simultaneously. The delivery suites were full of women with broken limbs, giving birth.
“One woman lost a foot and gave birth to her baby amid the destruction. Like Dr Ghalayani’s patient she arrived at the unit without her newborn in a very distressed state. But I heard they found this baby alive, buried in the rubble the next day”.
Today the maternity unit is calm. A row of women about to give birth sit patiently on a line of plastic chairs, grateful, it seems that a kind of peace has returned.
“I was so scared during the attacks,” one tells us. “It was too early for me, but I came to the hospital anyway and stayed here for three days because I was scared I would go into labour at home and help would be unable to reach me.”