Hawaii’s Struggle To Provide Health Care For Rural Islands Nearly Turned Tragic For This Expectant Mom

July 12, 2023 Vera

Kristen Bettencourt-Pedro bolted awake at 2:30 a.m. and felt her water break. It was Feb. 6, almost five weeks before her baby’s due date.

In most circumstances, a woman in premature labor would rush by car to the nearest hospital, where medical staff would try to suppress labor or, if it couldn’t be stopped, get ready to deliver the baby.

But Bettencourt-Pedro, 34, lives on Molokai, where women with complicated pregnancies must board a plane in order to give birth under the care of a doctor.

The island’s lone hospital doesn’t perform cesarean sections and it prohibits vaginal births for mothers like Bettencourt-Pedro who have a prior history of C-sections. Women who give birth at the 15-bed Molokai General Hospital sign up for an unmedicated delivery with little access to medical interventions if things go awry.

It was just before 3 a.m. when Bettencourt-Pedro’s husband whisked her out of his truck and into the hospital’s fluorescent-lit birthing room. Medical staff ordered an air ambulance to transport her to Oahu while a nurse gave her drugs to slow or stop her body from trying to push the baby out.

Hawaii Life Flight has been providing air medical transportation in Hawaii since 2010. The company operates seven bases on five islands. (David Croxford/Civil Beat/2023)

Her contractions did not let up. And the state’s only air ambulance company had two other patients to move that morning before it could point a helicopter toward Molokai, just 26 miles southeast of the Honolulu medical hub.

Hours passed and, by dawn, still no air ambulance had arrived. The nurses tried to assure Bettencourt-Pedro that if worst came to worst she could push the baby out with the assistance of a midwife. But she remembers thinking she was going to die.

“It was scary,” she said. “I felt like I wasn’t being treated like a priority.”

Hawaii has one air ambulance provider: Hawaii Life Flight. The private company usually operates seven fixed-wing aircraft and a helicopter, responding to an average of five to eight calls a day.

But its capacity buckled last year on Dec. 15, when one of its planes crashed in the ocean, killing a pilot, flight nurse and paramedic. The company grounded its aircraft on every island except

NE Ohio girl honors mom, sister by returning to med university

March 30, 2023 Vera

‘It’s a reminder that I am a illustration of them and I won’t be able to give up due to the fact of that, or I am not honoring them,’ Shamone Gore Panter reported.

CLEVELAND — At 43, Shamone Gore Panter — a doing work mom of 4 — chose a distinct path, when lifetime took a unexpected convert.

“My mother passed absent a handful of years in the past,” Panter spelled out. “She was young. My sister passed absent just not long ago she was young.

“What received me heading was when my mother passed absent — unexpected cardiac demise just out of the blue.”

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Getting rid of the two her mother and sister determined Shamone to ultimately chase her passion and turn out to be a medical doctor.

“I was like, ‘OK, I will need to determine out why this transpired,'” she recalled of the aftermath. “‘This won’t make any feeling to me.'”

So, in December, she went back to professional medical college. She was approved into the TCC software, regarded as the “Transformative Treatment Continued” application, a 6-yr Ohio Point out University curriculum supplied by Cleveland Clinic precise to those people who want to observe family drugs.

Plan Director Dr. Sandy Snyder suggests it was a perfect fir for Panter.

“We seriously test to go soon after pupils who have roots in Northeast Ohio and also occur from distinctive racial and ethnic backgrounds,” Panter claimed. “We are truly on the lookout forward to generating a workforce that seriously seems like the communities we serve.

“[Shamone] has that — the lived encounter, a ton of grit, and is just passionate about family members drugs and wanting to make a change in the community, so she suits effectively into this program.”

Shamone says the pandemic player a massive position in her final decision to return to the classroom, as well.

“[I] did some instructing, taught part-time initially and then received a whole-time work,” she explained to us. “And then COVID took place, and Black individuals did not do nicely during COVID.

“We have these significant premiums of some of the persistent conditions like diabetes, hypertension. Some of it had to do with the absence of belief in the medical area which is actually unfortunate for the reason that we pay back for it.”

In chasing her desire, Panter recognized just how

Ashburn mom finds a healthy new lifestyle after joining a local gym | News

December 7, 2022 Vera

As a busy mother of three children with a husband who served in the military, like many mothers, Ingrid Herrera-Yee of Ashburn often finds that it is difficult to prioritize her own health and fitness needs.

Last year, Herrera-Yee, 54, said she had high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels and was on the obese side of the body mass indicator (BMI) chart.