During a trip to Honduras, nursing student Norma O’Brien found herself tending to an emergency situation where a mother was in the midst of delivering a baby who was being strangled by the umbilical cord.
Nursing student Norma O’Brien decided to skip the talent show but wound up being a rock star anyway.
Earlier this summer, O’Brien was one of six senior year nursing students who participated in an international clinical experience in Honduras.
During the 12-day trip, which fulfills the clinical component of a community health nursing course, O’Brien knew she’d be part of a child health brigade, serving with a multidisciplinary team of nursing and medical students, residents, physicians, dentists and other allied health professionals.
Initially the trip was very enlightening, O’Brien says, but it was pretty much uneventful until the night before departure when she opted to be on call in the clinic instead of participating in a talent show that wrapped up the trip.
“I’m 37 and I just really didn’t want to do it,” she jokes now, citing shyness. As it happened, her true talent—as a skilled nurse—was needed.
Within minutes of clinic duty O’Brien was tending to an already stabilized patient when the only other health care worker on site—a Honduran nurse—came into the room, frantically speaking in Spanish.
O’Brien followed the nurse to another exam room and encountered a crisis: an expectant mother in the throes of childbirth, with something terribly wrong. The baby’s head was out but completely blue, the umbilical cord wound tightly around the neck.
“It was the darkest blue I’d ever seen,” says O’Brien, whose four years of training went into full tilt. First, she carefully unwrapped the cord and clamped it off in order to detach the baby from the mother. But the baby was still not breathing.
She then tried to start a suction tube, but the machine wasn’t getting any power. The next thing she did was grab a bulb syringe and manually remove mucus blocking the baby’s airway.
“Once the baby started to cry, I started to cry,” she says, adding, “Going down there I thought I might get to see a delivery, but I didn’t know I was going to be the one to do it!”
While there were physicians nearby, O’Brien “had to act immediately” to save the child’s life, says Roberta Lee, the assistant professor of clinical nursing who led the group.
Lee taught the course with nursing associate professor Tina Weitkamp, director of the College of Nursing’s Center for International Affairs.
“Things don’t always work in a foreign country like they do here, but you never know what’s going to happen in community nursing regardless of location,” says Lee, who has worked extensively abroad in nursing and public health.
However, O’Brien, who now has her bachelor’s degree in nursing, does know what’s going to happen next—at least career-wise.
“I had always wanted to go into obstetrics but had just kind of given up due to the competition. This experience seemed to reaffirm that where I want to be is obstetrics.”
“Anyone would be lucky to get her,” says Lee of O’Brien. “She knows what to do.”
The service trip was coordinated through the Honduran Ministry of Health through Shoulder to Shoulder, an international organization, which uses primary health care, nursing services, public health, dental care, nutrition and education to improve health outcomes in poor communities.
