Substantial percentage of deliveries both in Ukraine and in the rest of the world are accompanied by children asphyxia and, as a result, hypoxia. This is the condition under which the brain and tissues of a newborn baby or a baby during the very act of labor, experience shortage of oxygen. As a result, the tissues of the young body suffers from acute lack of oxygen and bears excessive overload. The brain goes physically damaged, and hemorrhages emerge in body tissues.
The process of coming into this world is not a picnic
The statistics is rather disappointing: up to eight babies per a hundred experience complications resulted from delivery. It is asphyxia and its consequential complications that make the most serious factor and the main cause of disaster in this unsatisfactory statistics. While minor levels of asphyxia leave the chances for recuperation and quick compensation of the damage in the nearest future, the more serious grade of suffocation carries along quite serious risks of a lifetime ill health, – in case a baby survives.
This is the place where babies’ health and the slightest changes in their condition are being closely monitored every minute
Asphyxia belongs to the kind of obvious, common, basic still highly dangerous complications. Sometimes, asphyxia occurs even before a baby is born – in utero; rather often, they happen in the process of delivery. This is caused by a number of reasons, starting from infections or genetic anomalies to mechanical suffocation and birth trauma. Is it possible to prevent such hard damage and save a child from a lifetime disability?
…and even at night!
Luckily, there is a way allowing to recompense the consequences of asphyxia. Even those not engaged in medicine, can conclude that doctors can use cytoprotectors able of partial securing the tissues from oxygen deprivation, or apply additional oxygen. Still, doctors should avoid excessive usage of oxygen in view of its twofold helpfulness. Subsequently, medical staff can correct little patients’ conditions applying various medications depending on blood gases percentage. But to know the proportion of blood gases they need to measure their level first! Here is where we come up to a crucial point.
Within the Help Me Breathe initiative, volunteers of People’s Project have been raising funds aiming to purchase a mobile gas analyzer for Kyiv perinatal center №3. Actually, they already possess an old-fashioned one, still this device is able of measuring oxygen levels only. However, a doctor needs to get the whole picture of blood gases and electrolytes. The device we are going to buy, gives thorough representation of blood gases ratio in the body. Moreover, the apparatus is designed for instant application, specifically even during the labor, before a baby is born, which allows saving precious time.
The apparatus allows saving lives of tiny babies like this one, even before they’re born
The device’s cost makes 225 thousand hryvnias. Naturally, it would be silly to expect purchasing it by any state bodies, as the maternity house is the municipal property. The officials will most likely keep juggling the applications and requests for months, with no hope for satisfying these. This only means dozens of kids will keep suffering during this period of time. To raise the amount at the expense of a few friends’ contributions looks rather unrealistic as well: many of us never earn the comparable sum in a whole year. But as volunteers we have a particular way of action that has already proven effective many times. Suppose everyone of us joins the initiative and donates at least a couple, a dozen or a hundred hryvnias into it, – thus we’ll manage to accumulate the necessary amount quite easily, as our previous experience testifies. No doubt that our shared effort is going to result in the situation when newborn citizens of Ukraine’s capital will come into this world enjoying sound health and having avoided severe threats to it. In a sense, these kids belong to all of us as a nation, so we cannot afford keeping away from their troubles, can we?
