A woman has just given birth.
Everybody is happy. Then suddenly, she starts bleeding.
This is postpartum haemorrhage, and when it happens, no one has time to ask where the drug, tranexamic acid or TXA is.
That drug, Tranexamic acid can help reduce deaths from bleeding when it is given early after PPH starts.
So if a facility is providing emergency obstetric care, TXA should not be something they start looking for when the emergency has started.
It should be there.
As a man, if your wife is preparing to give birth, ask if the facility has TXA available. Same thing if youโre pregnant and preparing for delivery.
Ask questions. Know what is available.
Prepare before the emergency comes.
RT so that expectant mothers and fathers can see this very important message.
Source: Data, provided by @womenadvocate and @LSHTM.
My wife has been visiting her mother every Friday for one year. Last Friday I followed her. She did not go to her mother. She went to a cemetery. She sat at a grave for three hours and talked. I checked the name on the gravestone. It was mine.
Chinedu was thirty-seven years old. He lived with his wife, Adanna, in a two bedroom flat in Awka. He sold building materials. She was a seamstress who worked from home. They had been married for six years โ six quiet, ordinary, comfortable years.
No big fights. No big problems.
Just life.
So when Adanna started the Friday visits to her mother, Chinedu thought nothing of it.
"I want to start spending more time with Mama," she had told him one Thursday evening, folding his shirts on the bed. "She is getting old. I don't want to have regrets."
"Of course," Chinedu had said. "Go. Take her something every time." And she did.
Every Friday morning, Adanna packed a food flask, dressed up, and left by nine. She always returned by four. Always came back quiet and soft โ the way people came back from spending time with someone they loved.
Chinedu never questioned it.