After seeing several other very sick children, today, I saw a baby die for the first time. Eric had told me about some of the babies in the study that passed, usually on the weekends, but I had never actually seen one. This baby was born a couple hours before, sometime over the night. He was not enrolled in the study – the mother had been on ART for a long time – but we saw him anyways. The study assistant told Eric about the baby and about 30 minutes later we went to see him. The baby looked very sick and pale, white almost. Eric turned the baby over and it was not breathing, spit-up drooled out of his mouth. It didn’t look good though Eric could hear faint heartbeats. Eric started bagging the baby to resuscitate it and loads and loads of formula vomit came spilling out. Him and two nurses started chest compressions and bagging in an attempt to get him to breath on his on. They then tried putting oxygen back on. The baby died. The agogo (grandmother) was watching and we told her what had happened. The agogo got the father and then the nurse told him. It was hard watching this infant die in front of me, but it was a million times more difficult to see the father as he was told the news. I cannot imagine telling the mother, I’m sure it would be even more difficult. Apparently this happens all the time, usually due to a lack of monitoring or something, though this was not the case with this baby. Eric said he would often be called to see a patient and the patient would be dead when he got there and no one knew.
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