One Mother’s Story: A Casualty of Three Delays
Posted on May 11, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Health, India, International, women.
DIBRUGARH, India — One night in late March, about 24 weeks into her pregnancy, Sulekha Lohar woke feeling ill. Sharing a bed with her husband and two young sons, she felt her chest pounding and her legs swell. She began convulsing. After about an hour, her husband, not knowing what to do, decided to seek help from his parents.
Too poor to own a phone, Bhangru Lohar left his wife in bed and rushed from his humble home with a tin roof and mud floors down a dark, dirt path of the Ghorijan Tea Estate in upper Assam, past the piles of firewood, bamboo fences and homes of other tea workers, to his parents’ house. He woke his father, Rama Lohar, who woke the neighbors, and the men decided to bring Sulekha to the tea company’s health center, according to Bhangru and Rama, who independently told the Pulitzer Center this story.
There are three ways in which necessary treatment for pregnant mothers can be delayed that increases the chances of a maternal death, according to maternal health specialists. The first delay can occur when the mother or family first decides to seek appropriate medical care for a pregnancy or labor complication.
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