On this day, hospital staff are frantically treating a patient with a heart condition who had no diagnosis, because she did not have a health center in her rural community. Now, she is giving birth during cardiac arrest.
Nurses line up towels and scissors, preparing for C-section surgery as if they were going to war. Recinos, wearing a Garfield cat surgical cap and an N95 mask covering his face, pulls on a pair of gloves.
Recinos tells the woman (semi-conscious, scared and alone) that she is going to “feel a little cold”, while a group of doctors operates on her. After two hours in a tense operating room, the stress slowly fades as the patient’s vital signs stabilize with the constant “beep, beep, beep” of the heart monitor.
“If she had decided to give birth with a midwife, she would have died,” says Recinos.
However, it is these same traditional midwives who often convince women in high-risk situations to seek care in hospitals.
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“Keep this tradition alive”
In the high hills behind the Quetzaltenango hospital, Emelda López Sánchez sits in a single room in an adobe house in the heart of Concepción Chiquirichapa, a small town of 17,000 people crisscrossed by dirt roads and surrounded by potato plantations.
The midwife, 40, carefully wraps a blood pressure monitor around one of the woman’s arms as a dozen midwives watch closely. They watch as López Sánchez explains in her native language, Mam, how to take a blood pressure reading.
