Blood donors help save life of first-time mother
Maria Portelli woke up more than three hours after she was scheduled to give birth to her first daughter, but there was only an operating theatre nurse with her, and no baby.
Her maternal instinct kicking in, the 30-year-old immediately thought something was wrong with her daughter, but the hospital staff reassured her she had given birth to a healthy girl.
It emerged that she was the one who had required urgent medical intervention – she had lost so much blood after birth that blood had to be transferred urgently to Gozo by helicopter.
Ms Portelli said she never imagined she would need blood, especially considering that her pregnancy was a regular one.
She had been asked to turn up on a Monday for a C-section, when the Gozo General Hospital’s blood reserves are well-equipped. But not even this was enough for her postpartum hemorrhage, and more blood had to be flown in from Malta.
“I continued to need blood the following day, and as I started to come back to my senses I thanked God that I had been born at a time when blood transfusion was a regular procedure.
“My family knows someone who a couple of generations ago had gone through a similar experience and lost so much blood...