The birth story
From a video by Faith Driven Entrepreneur
Jenny Rose Wilson shares about her journey and calling to be a midwife:
When I was 13, I went to China for the first time. Then I went there for study abroad when I was in university and I felt drawn towards the west of China, starting to learn more about Tibetan and Muslim minorities and some of their needs.
I was invited to spend a week in a Tibetan maternity unit at a little hospital. Barely spoke Chinese, was still just finishing nursing school with no experience yet in the field. There was this woman in labour who finally made it to the delivery room. The baby's heart rate was just really, really, really too low. I knew that it wasn't good. The baby came out totally blue, totally limp, not responsive, cord wrapped tight around her neck twice. And they brought her over to this table and started just looking at her. There was just this reticence in the room, just kind of like, "Well, it's just too bad." And I'm just sitting there, kind of like, "Do something about this. Do something about this. Oxygen, oxygen.".
The baby was probably eight minutes old and hadn't breathed, hadn't had any oxygen for that time. And I just remember standing there and just saying, "God, I'm not ready to see a baby die today." I'm just not ready for that, just not prepared. The doctor comes in. He takes over her resuscitation, starts doing chest compressions, gets her intubated. And so he's instructing me what to do. And I'm helping give the breaths and he's helping to get her heart started again. But it was a long resuscitation and the doctor just kept saying, "You have to prepare yourself. She may not make it. And I don't think she will. She is not going to get the aftercare that she needs. She's a high risk for seizures. There's all these different things that she needs and she's not going to get them here. It would take the combined fortune of the entire extended family to get her the care that she needs in the city. And that's basically her only chance of survival." About 45 minutes after we started, she was finally breathing on her own, still hadn't opened her eyes.
There'd been training at the hospital but nothing was ready or done. I could see all these systemic issues about the value of life, about the value of minority life, the value of female life. And just how normal it is for life to be lost in that context.
The next day the charge nurse came up to me. She just looked at me, "Haven't you ever seen a baby die before? Well, it happens here all the time." She brought in the birth records from that year in the hospital. They had lost 12% of the babies that came into the hospital, and it was more than 26 babies that had died already that year. I felt I was mourning, not only for this baby girl, but also these others that had been lost - many of them just completely unnecessarily. They were in a facility that had everything that would be needed to resuscitate them. So I realised I needed more than a nursing degree to be able to really affect any change in those contexts, whether in China or somewhere else. I felt like God was calling me to become a midwife. And I was like, "Okay, I'm in. I'm in. I want to help."
Two years later, I moved back to that area and stayed for 18 months I got a phone call from Marie, this doctor's wife who lived in the city, and she said, "Hey, do you remember that baby from two years ago? I think I know where she is. And do you want to go with me to find her?"
She has some cerebral palsy, some deficits from her birth having gone that long without oxygen, but she's the most joyful, joyful, beautiful girl, and her family loves her so much. And when we saw them, they broke down weeping, "We've been looking for you for two and a half years to thank you for saving our baby and to thank the doctor for saving our baby's life." However, she had changed my life.
It's been really beautiful over the years that I've been walking out this journey into midwifery. I felt a one time I received a name from God. It was just the name, 'Friend'. He just said, "I want you to be willing to just be my friend. That's it. Forget about all the other stuff, all the other pressure that you could feel to perform or to produce a certain result or whatever. Would you just be willing to be my friend in places where I don't have many?"
So for me, being Jesus centred in my work is just really walking out being His friend first and then the midwife second.
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From a video by Faith Driven Entrepreneur, 01/12/2020