Seeing a C-Section

It was my fourth year doing work in Honduras and the first time I was entering an operating room outside of the U. S. The doctor, another girl two years younger than me, and I were instructed to put on scrubs and surgical masks. It was at least 80 degrees in the barely air conditioned hospital and I was sweating underneath my scrubs. We walked into the operating room to see a very pregnant young woman on the table. She was under anesthesia and had no knowledge of the strangers entering. As we stood in the operating room the surgeon made an incision. I breathed slowly I saw the blood, hoping I wouldn’t start to feel queasy. Before I had a chance to fully check in with my stomach, a baby was pulled out of the woman’s uterus and let out a cry.

The infant was handed to a nurse who took the baby into another room to get it cleaned up. My friend and I followed and were told that the baby was a boy. After he was cleaned up he was taken into yet another room where he was put in an incubator to stay warm. My friend and I looked at the tiny person who lay there with his eyes closed, barely aware of the world he had just entered. Slowly he opened his eyes and looked up at my friend and I. “Welcome to the world, little guy!” I exclaimed. I turned to the girl I was with and said, “Wow, we are the first things he has ever seen.” She responded by saying, “Lucky guy” and we both laughed.

I left the hospital that day knowing that I had seen something truly incredible. It was something that I would never have experienced in the United States. In the third world there are significantly fewer regulations on hospital protocols. What had happened there would not have so casually occurred in the U.S. because of rules and regulations that hospitals have. Two girls would not be allowed to enter the operating room of a stranger purely out of curiosity. It was an amazing opportunity that I was very grateful for and it opened my eyes to the differences in medical care between the U.S. and Honduras.

From the perspective of the staff at the hospital, this was not something particularly strange because the girls entering the operating room were accompanied by a white, American doctor. It reminded me of the privilege provided to people who were deemed incredibly wealthy compared to the poverty that people in the area lived in. For the hospital staff in Honduras, the strict regulations that take place in the United States surrounding medical care were as mysterious to them as entering an operating room to see a cesarean section was to me. It all depended on what we believed to be normal.

What I experienced that day was amazing. Seeing a baby enter the world is incomparable. Watching him open his eyes for the first time and look up at me is something that I will always remember. Many people are shocked upon finding out that I was allowed to enter the operating room without having to fill out paperwork or be there for some specific purpose. However, all of those people who express surprise are from the U.S. It would be easy for people to say that the Honduran doctors that day were being irresponsible letting people into the room to witness the C-section of a woman who was not aware that the birth of her child would be viewed by unfamiliar eyes, but to the doctors it did not seem all that strange. Judgment has to be suspended because what may seem irresponsible in one culture is viewed as normal in another.