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| Pregnancy & Childbirth: Self-administered C-section still amazes doctors |
KEYWORDS: self performed C-section medical miracles home childbirth amazing birth story
AUTHOR: Lisa J. Adams
Alone in her one-room cabin high in the mountains of
southern Mexico, Ines Ramirez Perez felt the pounding pains of a child
insistent on entering the world.
Three years earlier, she had given birth to a dead baby girl. As her labor
intensified, so did her concern for this unborn child.
The sun had set hours ago. The nearest clinic was more than 50 miles away over
rough terrain and inhospitable roads, and her husband, her only assistant
during a half-dozen previous births, was drinking at a cantina. She had no
phone and neither did the cantina.
So at midnight, after 12 hours of constant pain, the petite, 40-year-old
mother of six sat down on a low wooden bench. She took several gulps from a
bottle of rubbing alcohol, grabbed the 6-inch knife she used for butchering
animals and pointed it at her belly.
And then she began to cut.
Under the light of a single dim bulb, Ramirez sawed through skin, fat and
muscle before reaching inside her uterus and pulling out her baby boy. She
says she cut his umbilical cord with a pair of scissors, then passed out.
That was March 5, 2000. Today, the baby she delivered, Orlando Ruiz Ramirez,
is a rambunctious, playful 4-year-old. And Ines Ramirez is recognized
internationally as a modern miracle. She is believed to be the only woman
known to have performed a successful Caesarean section on herself.
In an interview with an Associated Press reporter in front of her isolated,
wood-plank home, she described her experience in halting Spanish, heavily
accented by her native Zapotec language.
"I couldn't stand the pain anymore," she said. "And if my baby was going to
die, then I decided I would have to die, too. But if he was going to grow up,
I was going to see him grow up, and I was going to be with my child. I thought
that God would save both our lives."
Though there were no witnesses available to confirm her account, the two
obstetricians who examined her 12 hours after the birth are wholly convinced.
And no one in her village challenges her story.
"We were astonished," Dr. Honorio Galvan told The Associated Press in an
interview at the San Pablo Huixtepec hospital south of Oaxaca City, where
Ramirez was taken.
"I couldn't believe that someone without anesthesia could operate on herself
and still be alive. To me, it is incredible."
Doctors rushed the mother and child into the operating room. Galvan took
photographs while his colleague, Dr. Jesus Guzman, opened Ramirez up to find
that her uterus had returned to its normal size and stopped bleeding and that
she showed no signs of infection. Galvan doesn't know if Ramirez tried to
sterilize the knife before she operated.
The doctors were so stunned by what they saw that they told Ramirez's story at
a medical meeting the following year. But the miracle birth got little
attention until it was reported in March in the International Journal of
Gynecology and Obstetrics.
The article was co-authored by Dr. Rafael Valle, an obstetrician at
Northwestern University in Chicago, who insisted the story "is not a hoax."
Galvan acknowledges there may be skeptics, but he has heard Ramirez give her
account several times, "always with the same details."
The doctor showed an AP reporter a video of the woman in which she explains
her fears that her baby would die and re-enacts the operation, sweeping her
hand in a diagonal line from across her stomach to below her navel. A typical
C-section incision would be well below the navel.
Galvan also relied on the testimony of the village health assistant, Leon
Cruz, who initially was summoned to help Ramirez and who described in detail
what he saw when he arrived. It was not possible during a recent visit to
contact Cruz in Rio Talea, a town of about 500 people where there is only one
phone.
"A whole village can't lie. What would they have to gain?" Galvan said.
Two town residents who were asked for directions to Ramirez's house referred
to her as the woman who had given herself a Caesarean section.
A diminutive woman who stands about 5-feet-2, Ramirez displayed the 6-inch
knife she used to perform the operation.
As she spoke, 4-year-old Orlando hugged her legs and flashed a white, baby-
toothed grin at the rare visitors to this house tucked into the side of cloud-
and-pine-covered hills.
Ramirez believes that she operated on herself for about an hour before
extricating her child and then fainting. When she regained consciousness, she
wrapped a sweater around her bleeding abdomen and asked her 6-year-old son,
Benito, to run for help.
Several hours later, Cruz and a second health worker - whose combined medical
knowledge was limited to handing out medicines - found Ramirez alert and lying
beside her live baby.
Cruz sewed her 7-inch incision together with a regular needle and thread. A
professional C-section incision measures about 4 inches, Galvan said.
The two men lifted mother and child onto a thin straw mat, lugged them up
vertical rock-strewn horse paths to the town's only road, and drove them to
the clinic 2 1/2 hours away.
Ramirez was given basic emergency medical attention before she was transferred
with Orlando to the backs of two different pickup trucks. They bounced for
eight hours over winding, hole-riddled dirt roads before making it to the
hospital in San Pablo Huixtepec, about 240 miles southeast of Mexico City.
Ramirez left the hospital after four days, and today her scar is almost
invisible.
By sitting forward in the traditional Indian birthing position instead of
lying down, Ramirez unknowingly ensured that her uterus was directly under the
skin and that she would not cut her intestines. Her incision was considerably
higher than the one a doctor would make, and Galvan believes she was very
lucky she didn't do serious damage.
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