Through it alone

A child is Allah's gift and amanah to both the parents. And it is the responsibility of both mother and father to be the guardian and shape the child's life until the child is ready to be on their own.

This incidence happened nearly 3 days ago. In the real world, not everything will turn out as planned despite all the preparation was to perfection. This is so true when it come to the birth of a child. Pregnancy is not an easy task- 9 months of uncertainty, of not really knowing what happening inside the womb. Medical technology had advances that we are able to peek into it and try to manage and intervene when required. Nevertheless, we as physician, well understood it is HIM to decide on what HE planned it to be. A mother may survived the 9 months with no complication, but i guess the end of the pregnancy, the starting of the birth of the child, is actually the real test-not just for the mother, but for the father as well. And again, as a medical proffesional-everyone of us, well understood-the best of care during both pregnancy and delivery may still lead to unwanted outcome.

This was what happened to one of the patients here. The pregnancy was uneventful, being the first pregnancy -the antenatal care was good. The delivery was rather uneventful too-yet despite that, ALLAH had planned that the child not to be as good as the care was. The baby was not breathing and responsive at birth despite all measures-and only after a long period-there was a minimal response. The outcome was bad, the life was dependent on the machine, with no sign to show the baby may survived. Saying that, it had been a job for the physician to try their very best and with any modalities. That all was done extensively, yet the outcome was unchanged.

In the world of pediatric especially in neonatology-one of the important responsibility other than providing care and giving hope, it is on the other hand-  to also realize the limitation and the destiny that ALLAH had planned for each of HIS creation. Explaining the situation to both the parents-is never something anybody can learn from any book or youtube. And in this case-it was truly a challenge. The parents' hope was termendous with a lot of misconception on the limitation of a medical world, and tend to forget on the reality of creation of life. The blaming game started with the father pointing fingers to the delivery and pregnancy-to any slight of "unreasonable" dissatisfaction. Each one of them was entertained to the fullest humanity.

After 17 days of going through it, the family understood and decided-there was no hope for the child. This was when the truth of a person really prevailed.

The preparation to let the baby "go" was done delicately with supposedly the parents to be with the child-cuddling the baby while letting the baby heart beat finally stopped. It is a powerful process and an important step for the emotional healing recovery of both parents. But, this was not what happened in this case.

From the start of the event-the father was not being responsive to the event, with unrealistic hope, followed by being argumentative and blaming. The mother was more receptive and accepting the faith of the child and try to understand limitation of human technology. It is something I see commonly in many cases.

Yet what touched me deeply, was during this final moment of the child, instead of being with the mother, going through the process of letting the baby go together-the father was sitting outside the curtain and "guarding" the cubicle-questioning the nurses and doctors who were doing their job, with no smile neither sadness-but full with confusion and unsatisfaction. The father refused to see the child and only ordered the nurses to take picture before and after the child had passed away, leaving the mother "alone" in a job-suppose to be done together.  Fortunately, the baby passed away peacefully with not much waiting.

That, however was not enough for the father. He wanted to know why the baby passed away despite the physician explanation, and personally request for the child to go through a postmortem to look for cause of the failure of life in his baby. The procedure was not easy as it was not a classical postmortem case-but finally was schedule with lot of arguments with the father.

The next day, the child was planned for postmortem as requested by the father. One of the first step of conducting postmortem is identification of the child by the family member. Despite the father was the one who eagerly want it to be done-yet, it was the mother that was "force" to be alone in the mortuary room, to identify the body of the child before the postmortem procedure.

I have enough to describe on this event. I do understand that it is not easy for the father to go through the death of the first baby that he had been waiting for. Yet....he totally forgot that the baby was his and his wife too. And being a "husband" and the "father", he have all the heart to let the newly delivered "fragile" wife to go through all the moments that he refused to be in, all alone. And I guess he never realised that if he felt terrible, the wife who was the "mother"-who was feeling and carrying the child for 9 months and had went through the labour all on her own...and yet-was eventually "forced" to go through this moments all alone on her own.

I wish for allah to give us guidance...and not to be selfish and ignorance, and to be unresponsible.....