Contraception in these parts...Marie Stopes

My internet has been abnormally slow over the last week....the lull is as frustrating for me, as you?

Marie Stopes came last week to perform family planning for our women. This is an international British NGO who rotates every 3 months through our center. Their funding comes from outside and they provide ‘the pill’, IUD’s, Implanon, and tubal ligations. On this day, we had a group of women to come for education – an overview of the different types with emphasis placed on why family planning is necessary. This was taught by the Marie Stopes team, primarily a physician from Kampala.

Of this group of women, only one stayed for contraception. I was told the rest “had to go home and ask their husband” first. Umm….

For the one woman who decided to stay, she opted for a tubal ligation. I thought, for sure, this would be done in some modified fashion vs. the OR types I observed in my training.

Instead, ‘when you don’t have an OR of your own, you make one with what you have’ took place. Laid out on a table, injected with only 20 cc of Lidocaine (you Medical people will understand!), two incisions were made, and the fallopian tubes cut. They did have sterile towels and equipment, which was good. She was instructed to lay on a mat outside for a few hours to monitor pain and bleeding and then jumped on the back of a motorcycle with her husband and went home. 

Total African style Surgery!

This series of pictures are what a tubal ligation looks like ... This is a fallopian tube.

Fallopian tube being tied off before cutting.

Fallopian tube being cut.

All with the bats (rats?) climbing in the roof above us making their scratchy, nibbly sounds, sterile field illuminated by a pocket flashlight, and no pain medicine to be had.

Just goes to show you how much of a fuss we can make very simple procedures or how normalized the operating room can be in this setting.

*photos are not mine. Taken by Rosie Meroz