Wow, it’s been a long time and so much has happened in the past few months. To catch up, let’s go back to March 2021. Buckle up, this is a long one.
Rachel’s very pregnant and it doesn’t seem to faze her at all. She’s working full days in the hospital, cooking and cleaning like there’s been no change. A pregnant woman is always an exciting thing in Sierra Leone. Both pregnancy and infanthood are so tenuous that people tend to celebrate every little thing. There’s a nurse at the hospital who’s due date is just a month earlier than Rachel’s. They take maternity pictures together and it’s a very exciting time.
Rachel is scheduled to go back to the US about 5 weeks before her due date and thankfully travels without incident. The most memorable ‘amenity’ of being pregnant happens in the Lungi airport. The staff see she’s pregnant and decide that they need to help her move her carry on everywhere. So when she has to go to the bathroom, they follow her in , escort her to a stall, and get to listen to every detail. Privacy clearly means something different in Africa. Thankfully the rest of the trip is uneventful.
After her departure I’m left alone for about 3-4 weeks with plans to return to the US about 2 weeks before the due date. She left food for me in the freezer, a list of things to pack and do before leaving, as well as sticky notes around the house with cute little notes. Some of them seem like she can see the future. Sometimes when I’m hungry and too lazy to cook (or even reheat), I’ll just eat peanut butter off of a spoon. When I get to the peanut butter in the pantry I pick it up and there’s a note: “This had better not be your whole meal.” BUSTED in absentia!
Later in the week the nurse with a similar due date goes into labor. A nurse is called to perform the delivery and things don’t go well. The baby is tachypneic (breathing too fast) and hypoxic (low oxygen). They call Dr. Kabba and he arrives as quickly as possible, but not before some unnecessary procedures were done. He stabilizes the child who is then reunited with the mother. A few hours later the condition worsens again and Dr. Kabba is called to return. He works on the baby for several hours, even needing to provide positive pressure with a bag valve mask (forcing air into the lungs because the baby is too weak to breath). After several hours he calls me in for backup and we continue to work throughout the night. The condition doesn’t improve and by morning we teach the family to provide the breaths and we go home to rest for an hour or two. After a quick catnap, I return to the hospital to find the baby in worse condition and it’s time to make a difficult decision. Do we keep the baby here where we have good staff but inadequate pediatric supplies or do we send the baby to the government hospital where there are more resources but occasionally they are inadequately staffed? We decide to send the baby to the bigger hospital. At this point my apple watch tells me I’ve stood at least one minute out of every hour for the last 23 of 24 hours. I’m exhausted and the day has just begun and patients are arriving to be seen.
I check back throughout the day with both the mother and the baby. The baby’s condition slowly worsens and she dies within 24 hours of transfer. The tradition in Sierra Leone is that you don’t tell the mother about the baby’s death until she has ‘recovered’ from labor. So I’m forced to smile and nod when she tells me, “they tell me the baby is getting better at the other hospital.” The next night I get a call around 11pm and the mother needs help with her breast pump, as she’s excitedly pumping milk for her deceased child. I decide it’s better to not tell Rachel all the details and I give her a vague idea of what’s going on before I go to sleep.
At 5AM I wake up to see lots of missed calls from Rachel and the phone currently ringing. I pick up and she tells me her water has broken. It’s only been 10 days since she arrived in the US and a month before the baby is due. I’m not supposed to travel for another 2 weeks! I immediately start to work: buying plane tickets, packing to travel, preparing the house (absolutely everything needs to be put into totes), paying all the bills we owe, preparing for ways to pay our security and house keeper while we’re gone, and the most difficult – get a COVID test. At 7AM I call Emily and Peter Sheriff who know someone at the lab. They pull all the strings, pay all the ‘tips,’ I get swabbed, and after a few hours I’m sitting at the airport without a COVID result. I don’t have any money for transportation or a hotel. I’ve banked everything on this test coming through. And thankfully it does.
I get to check in and the agent says, “there’s something wrong with your ticket, they’re waiting for you in the office upstairs.” I go to the office and the problem is that I have two layovers in the EU. After the US banned EU citizens from entering due to COVID, similar restrictions were placed on US citizens. Individual airlines and cities negotiated exemptions, but my ticket violated that. I told the agent my story and he looked at me and said, “you’re a desperate man aren’t you?”
With the changes, I wasn’t able to fly directly to Bismarck without an 18 hour layover. So we orchestrated a plan where my mother would meet me in Atlanta airport and join me on a flight to Minneapolis. My long time friend, Chris Block, would drive from Bismarck and pick us up in Minneapolis. Mom would drive through the night and Chris would sleep as he had to work at 7AM the next morning. By the time I arrive in the hospital, it’s been 52 hours since Rachel called.
I get to the locked maternity unit and my sleep deprived brain says into the speaker, “This is the late husband of Rachel Fernando.” Only the next morning did I realize it sounded like I was dead and not just late for the birth. Rachel sleepily greets me and we had a brief conversation before heading to the Neonatal ICU.
Liam was born more than 24 hours prior to my arrival and was tachypneic and hypoxic, so he was admitted to the NICU. Sound familiar? It quickly dawned on me that my son had exactly the same symptoms as the baby I had just worked on for days. But Liam had the luck to be born in the US.
The culture shock was like nothing I had ever experienced. As I sat in the NICU, I had absolutely no concerns for Liam. He was in the best hands and improving with ‘simple’ things I was unable to provide to another new born just days earlier. The relief of arriving and the joy of a first born child mixed with the fatigue of travel and grief of losing a different baby just unlucky to be born in different circumstances. I couldn’t help but think that my son lives simply because of our wealth while our friend’s baby is born with identical symptoms and dies. The culmination of those few days left in me a strong understanding of the cruelty of this unjust world. All we truly have to cling to, regardless of our place of birth, is the hope of the second coming and resurrection. What good news it is, but how easily we forget until we are jerked to our senses.
Liam recovered quickly and was discharged without incident a week later. We spent some time in North Dakota with Rachel’s parents, then went to Tennessee to spend time with my family. After our arrival in TN, Rachel began to have severe abdominal pain. We did some investigations and found out her IUD had perforated her uterus and was loose in her abdomen requiring surgery. Coordinating all of the imaging and surgical preparation when your primary doctor is in ND and the patient is in TN is quite difficult. Finding someone to perform the surgery took another several days of struggle. Eventually the surgery was scheduled, but it became clear that we would have to delay our return to Sierra Leone.
The surgery went off without a hitch and Rachel recovered quickly. But soon another deadline approached. The day after we received Liam’s passport, we mailed our passports to the Sierra Leonian Embassy in DC for visas. Things went smoothly with the embassy but the US Postal service lost our passports in the mail. The tracking showed that they bounced between DC and North Carolina for 2.5 weeks, then went to Atlanta for a few days. We called every number we could find, but nobody could assist us. It came down to Friday when we were scheduled to fly on Monday. Should we get a mandatory travel COVID test on Friday even though we don’t have passports? The mail runs on Sabbath but not Sunday, and our flight leaves at 7AM on Monday. We decided to step out in faith. Sure enough, the passports arrived on the last possible day.
We arrived in Sierra Leone two days ago still shell shocked by the last few months. It’s wonderful to be back and every old challenge seems new and different now that we have Liam. COVID is still a huge challenge for Sierra Leone and the 3rd wave has been much more lethal than previous waves. Looking back, it’s easy to see God blessing through difficult circumstances and we believe he will continue those blessings now that our family is just a little bigger.
Thanks for reading and thanks for all your prayers and support.
