On a day of death and destruction, a newborn girl fought for her life in the rubble beside her mother’s lifeless body, reports Al Jazeera.
In the afternoon of that day when a series of earthquakes ripped through Turkey and Syria, Dr Hany Maarouf, 43, returned to his duties at the Jehan Hospital in Afrin, in Syria’s northwest, having made sure his wife and seven children were safe.
At about 3pm, a man and woman ran in, the man holding in his arms a small bundle, shouting that they needed a paediatrician. Their faces showed panic that had turned to despair. This was the sixth hospital they had run to with their precious bundle – baby Aya, who had just been born in the rubble of a collapsed building to a mother who had died.
A miracle in the rubble
Assuring them that he was a paediatrician, Maarouf gently took the baby from them but what he saw “terrified” him.
“I wasn’t sure she was even alive – she was pale, cold, silent. Her limbs were blue and her body was covered with bruises,” he recalled.
Then a faint pulse was discovered and he and his team sprang into action. They wrapped the baby with warmed blankets and placed her in an incubator, watching her until she warmed up enough that they were able to find a vein to hook her up to calcium and glucose solutions.
The man who had brought her in – her aunt’s husband – and the woman who accompanied him – a neighbour – were relieved that Aya was going to be saved, but the cruel reality of that day meant they could not stay any longer by her side as they had to go find their own families, and possibly count and bury their dead.
Four days after baby Aya was first brought in and named by the hospital staff, Maarouf tells Al Jazeera that she is doing much better and that the hospital team has pulled together to make sure she is well taken care of. Although she still spends the day in an incubator, baby Aya is being breastfed by a volunteer who comes in several times a day, which provides her with the human, skin-to-skin contact babies need to thrive, in addition to the antibodies and nutrients that can only be found in human breast-milk.
And she has thrived, Maarouf says proudly, adding that she is putting on weight, showing all the positive indicators and all-around doing much better than he had expected. While he, as a father of seven, often finds himself too deeply moved by the baby’s plight to spend too much time at her side, many of the nursing staff visit her, sitting by her incubator and watching her sleep or coo and wave her arms.
The circumstances of baby Aya’s mother going into labour remain undetermined, but Maarouf says it is very possible for a woman to go into labour due to shock and for the labour to continue to its end regardless. That the rescuers on Monday heard baby Aya’s cries in the rubble and were able to remove her and get her to help within hours was “first and foremost due to God’s mercy”, Maarouf says.
Surprisingly, he adds, it was possible that the extreme cold complicating rescue efforts had played a role in keeping baby Aya alive until she was found. Because of the cold, she went into hypothermia, which is actually a therapy used in neonatal hospitals to save babies whose brains lack oxygen at birth. This would have preserved her brain function until the hospital staff were able to warm her up and start her care.
