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RESEARCH
ort Worth
physician David McRay
recalls the anesthesiologist
calling out in a chiding tone
for the pregnant woman to cease
her moaning.
It was in an overcrowded hospital in
Uganda in what is widely considered the
busiest obstetric ward in the world. Trying to wait
quietly through labor pains and the discomfort of a
knee injury, the woman struggled to sit upright for an
anesthetic shot for some relief.
“Don’t make noise for us!” McRay recalls the anesthesiologist
shouting at the woman.
Rather than simply observing what he called the Ugandan
medical staff ’s “callous disregard for human suffering,” McRay
sat down next to the woman and helped steady her. The woman
leaned her head on his shoulder in appreciation,
he remembers.
About 30,000 babies are delivered at that African hospital every
year. Some of the mothers die in childbirth, and some of the
babies don’t make it, he said.
In such a setting, he said, the callous attitude of the staff should
be viewed not as a heartless act, but as a coping mechanism.
McRay, the director of maternal-child health at John Peter
Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, shared those experiences leading
a medical team from JPS in multiple training trips to Mulago
Hospital in Kampala with an audience of students and faculty
at Palko Hall.
McRay was the guest of the Harris College of Nursing & Health
Sciences and the university’s Quality Enhancement Program
Initiative, which has a 2014 focus on Africa and the Caribbean.
His presentation was titled “A Family Physician in Uganda:
Cesareans, Ultrasounds and Existential Crisis at Mulago Hospital.”
On those trips to Africa, McRay helps teach new techniques to
the doctors at Mulago. Despite being a 1,500-bed hospital, the
staff there had never used ultrasound equipment until his JPS
team trained them in the technology using a mobile unit.
McRay doesn’t just watch on the three-week-long trips. He helps
deliver babies and tend to the pregnant women, who must
F
I CAME
BECAUSE
I CARED
AN AMERICAN PHYSICIAN
RECALLS HIS TIME IN AFRICA
“I THOUGHT TO MYSELF,
‘NO ONE IS GOING TO
DIE TONIGHT.
”
By Mark Wright ‘07 (MS) ‘11 (MLA)
Reprinted with permission from
TCU Magazine
, Spring 2014
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· Harris College of Nursing & Health Sciences