Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to this one's a doozy. My name
Speaker 1: is Mal and I am thrilled to have you join
Speaker 1: me on this very adult version of Storytime on the
Speaker 1: Mat primary school style, where I tell you a true
Speaker 1: tale that is so fascinating it'd be a shame if
Speaker 1: you didn't know about it. Well, well, well, hasn't it
Speaker 1: been quite some time since we last met here? Hey,
Speaker 1: I really bloody love doing these episodes, but you know, life, work, etc.
Speaker 1: Means that I haven't been able to do one for
Speaker 1: a while. But that doesn't matter right now, because here
Speaker 1: I am and here you are, and today I am
Speaker 1: going to tell you a truly harrowing, slash courageous slash
Speaker 1: miraculous story that is I think I'm not overstating it
Speaker 1: when I say that it's really going to blow your
Speaker 1: tips right off. It's about a woman, a mother, who
Speaker 1: did something back in two thousand in order to save
Speaker 1: her baby that quite frankly should have seen her inducted
Speaker 1: into some kind of hall of fame and given a
Speaker 1: novelty check for services to life. Anyway, before we get
Speaker 1: into it, just a quick warning that this story does
Speaker 1: mention stillworth so if that's going to be troubling for you.
Speaker 1: Skip this one and we'll catch up next time. Okay.
Speaker 1: So it's March two thousand, What a time to be alive.
Speaker 1: We were all still celebrating the fact that the world
Speaker 1: didn't explode when the clocks ticked over. On New Year's
Speaker 1: the number six song on the ARIA charts was this
Speaker 1: classic youst Poison by Pardo, catchy tune. It's also the
Speaker 1: year that j Loo wore that green Vesaci number to
Speaker 1: the Grammys. You know that was cut right down to
Speaker 1: her vagimee iconic. Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston got married,
Speaker 1: and interestingly, so did Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton.
Speaker 1: And look how that turned out for all involved. It
Speaker 1: was also the year that Survived premiered on TV that
Speaker 1: Eminem exploded with the real, Slim, shady and fun fact,
Speaker 1: the term stan was inducted into the Miriam Webster Dictionary
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen off the back of his hit song
Speaker 1: called Stan. And in south central Mexico, near the city
Speaker 1: of Wahaka, a heavily pregnant, forty year old woman named
Speaker 1: Innes Ramirez Perez was in some serious trouble just to clarify,
Speaker 1: when I say city, I don't mean like Melbourne CBD.
Speaker 1: This particular region that Inez lived in with her family
Speaker 1: is called Sierra Mixteka, and the area is predominantly populated
Speaker 1: by miztech people who are indigenous to the area. And
Speaker 1: when I say it is rural, I mean it's rural.
Speaker 1: I always have trouble with that word. It's rural with
Speaker 1: two capital arts. To give you an idea. We're talking
Speaker 1: no phones, no electricity, no running water, and no sanitation.
Speaker 1: Homes in this particular area are typically mudharts and it
Speaker 1: is very mountainous and very very isolated. So basically all
Speaker 1: the stuff that we just take for granted, like calling
Speaker 1: an ambulance and being like fifteen minutes away from a
Speaker 1: major hospital, that's not happening here. The nearest hospital is
Speaker 1: like eight hours away. So you know, this is the
Speaker 1: kind of life where you work hard, you live off
Speaker 1: the land, and when the sun goes down and there's
Speaker 1: no TV and no phones. The assumption is when you're
Speaker 1: a grown up, you occupy yourself with other activities. I mean,
Speaker 1: what else are you gonna do? Anyway, This coupled with
Speaker 1: what I'd assume to be a lack of access to
Speaker 1: Durex ribbed for her pleasure condoms probably explains why Inez
Speaker 1: was pregnant with her eighth child. So on the night
Speaker 1: of March fifth, two thousand, she's home with her six kids. Now,
Speaker 1: I did just say that this was her eighth pregnancy,
Speaker 1: because sadly she'd lost her previous baby due to complications
Speaker 1: during the delivery, and in is in some very active
Speaker 1: labor at this point. There are conflicting reports as to
Speaker 1: where her husband was during this time. Some say that
Speaker 1: he was out selling beans to try and make some
Speaker 1: cash for the family. Some say he was out deer hunting,
Speaker 1: but many others say that he was at the local
Speaker 1: canteena getting shit faced. Who really knows, I'm putting my
Speaker 1: money on the CANTEENA. It's probably where I'd be if
Speaker 1: I had that many kids and no TV. That's a
Speaker 1: joke anyway. It's been about twelve hours since Inez's labor started,
Speaker 1: and she is in some serious pain. And you know,
Speaker 1: if you've ever given birth before, particularly without pain relief,
Speaker 1: you'll be familiar with the it's hard to describe, really,
Speaker 1: maybe incomprehensible. Agony is sort of in the ballpark of
Speaker 1: how it feels like you're about to shot out a
Speaker 1: medicine ball, and that's when things are going well and
Speaker 1: as planned. However, Inez is in tune enough with her
Speaker 1: body to know that something feels very wrong, and she's
Speaker 1: terrified because, as I'd mentioned earlier, her seventh child, a daughter,
Speaker 1: was delivered stillborn due to an obstructed delivery. It's sort
Speaker 1: of hard to wrap your head around that, because for
Speaker 1: most of us, there's this level of comfort in knowing
Speaker 1: that if you're faced with this sort of situation, you're
Speaker 1: in a major hospital, you're likely going to be whisked
Speaker 1: away from an emergency c section to save the life
Speaker 1: of your baby and yourself. However, this wasn't an option
Speaker 1: for inn As then, and it certainly wasn't an option
Speaker 1: on the night of March fifth of two thousand either.
Speaker 1: So here she is laboring alone, no worse, with six
Speaker 1: kids around her who are probably watching on with those
Speaker 1: giant core memory balls from that movie inside out dropping
Speaker 1: in their brains, and she is exhausted, and she's pushing
Speaker 1: and pushing, but the baby is just not coming. And
Speaker 1: she knows that this feeling is the same that she
Speaker 1: had with her last labor. So imagine the fear. So
Speaker 1: what do you do? I don't know, but I can
Speaker 1: tell you what INES does. She grabs a bottle of
Speaker 1: olkl hole from the kitchen. Visit racist for me to
Speaker 1: assume it's tequila. I hope not, because I feel like
Speaker 1: it definitely would be. She takes a few big swigs,
Speaker 1: but there is not enough to kill a shots in
Speaker 1: the world. To deal with what she's about to do next,
Speaker 1: she asks one of her kids to hand her the
Speaker 1: knife sitting on the bench, the old knife with a
Speaker 1: six inch blade that was used to kill animals on
Speaker 1: their property. She pours some of the alcohol onto it
Speaker 1: in the hopes it'll sanitize it. And with alcohol as
Speaker 1: her anesthetic, an old worn knife as her scalpel, and
Speaker 1: the experience of butchering animals in place of a medical degree,
Speaker 1: Inez Ramirez Perez lots of Z's squats down and begins
Speaker 1: trying to cut her baby free. Now I'm going to
Speaker 1: get a little bit graphic here, so if you don't
Speaker 1: like details, skip ahead. I don't know thirty seconds, okay,
Speaker 1: So you know how a C section is typically a
Speaker 1: very low horizontal incision. Well, Inez doesn't know that because remember,
Speaker 1: there's no TV, so she's not up with the latest
Speaker 1: episodes of ER. So she makes vertical incisions three attempts
Speaker 1: in total, with lucky number three, running from beside her
Speaker 1: belly button just sort of at the bottom of her
Speaker 1: rib cage all the way down to her pubic area,
Speaker 1: and for over an entire fucking hour, she cuts through
Speaker 1: I don't even know how many layers of skin and
Speaker 1: muscle and fat until finally she reaches into her uterus
Speaker 1: and feels a leg, and she grabs onto that tiny
Speaker 1: leg and twists and pulls until eventually she's holding a tiny, screaming,
Speaker 1: healthy baby boy in her arms. She cuts the umbilical
Speaker 1: cord with a pair of scissors, probably curses her husband
Speaker 1: for being such a dead shit at the canteena, and
Speaker 1: then passes out. Imagine how scared her kids would have
Speaker 1: been looking on watching mum cutting into her stomaching out
Speaker 1: baby brother, and then just collapsing like as if they're
Speaker 1: gonna know whether she's alive or not. Ugh. Inez eventually
Speaker 1: does wake up, and she knows she needs some help
Speaker 1: quick sticks, so while she ties a jumper around her
Speaker 1: tummy to try and stop the bleeding. She sends her
Speaker 1: six year old son, Benito, out into the village finds
Speaker 1: some help, and Benito eventually does return with Inza's cousin
Speaker 1: and this young local health assistant named Leon Cruz, and
Speaker 1: they are shook because what they find is Inez on
Speaker 1: the floor holding a newborn baby with a gaping hole
Speaker 1: in her abdomen. And this next bit is hectic, so warning,
Speaker 1: but she was sort of disembowled, so part of her
Speaker 1: intestine and stuff were coming out. So Leon knows that
Speaker 1: the number one priority right now is to get that
Speaker 1: stuff back inside of her and stop the bleeding. So
Speaker 1: he puts what's out back in and makes do with
Speaker 1: what is available to him, And after busting into Inez's
Speaker 1: little haberdasherie stash, he grabs a needle and thread like
Speaker 1: from spotlight, the kind you'd use to sew a button
Speaker 1: on with, and he stitches up the main cut in
Speaker 1: Inez's abdomen, all seventeen centimeters of it. They lay in
Speaker 1: theirs onto a straw mat and lug her up this
Speaker 1: steep mountain path until they get to the main road,
Speaker 1: where she and the baby, who she named Orlando by
Speaker 1: the way, should have called him Maracolo. But anyway, they
Speaker 1: put into a car and driven to the closest medical center,
Speaker 1: and the staff at the medical center are like, what
Speaker 1: the fuck are we meant to do about this? So
Speaker 1: they give her some basic emergency medical attention, which really
Speaker 1: hope by this point included at the very least some
Speaker 1: neurathan and a bit of dead ole, and send them
Speaker 1: on their way to the nearest hospital, which this poor
Speaker 1: poor woman, this is like an eight hour drive through
Speaker 1: the mountains, and we're not talking nice smooth Ashvelt roads,
Speaker 1: think gravel and potholes and so many bumps. But eventually
Speaker 1: they arrived at hospital in San Pablo, where Innes and
Speaker 1: Orlando were immediately sent into the operating theater. One of
Speaker 1: the attending doctors, doctor Anario Gualvin, He said, quote when
Speaker 1: she arrived, she was conscious, with no signs of shock,
Speaker 1: perfectly fine considering what she had just put her body through.
Speaker 1: She at least should have been unconscious from the blood
Speaker 1: loss and the pain. Doctor Jesus Goosman opened up Inez's
Speaker 1: stitching with a quick unpick joke. But you know, he
Speaker 1: opened the limb craft stitching while his colleague took some
Speaker 1: happy snaps to document the event. Probably knew people were
Speaker 1: going to call bullshit, and how's this Inza's uterus had
Speaker 1: stopped pleading, showed zero signs of infection, and had already
Speaker 1: started contracting back in size, just like in any other
Speaker 1: normal standard delivery. So the doctors were more than a
Speaker 1: little flawed by the fact that a both mother and
Speaker 1: baby had survived the ordeal. B there was no significant
Speaker 1: damage to any of her internal organs and no evidence
Speaker 1: of sepsis, despite the fact that she used an old
Speaker 1: knife and like no better dean or any real kind
Speaker 1: of disinfecting or antibacterial agent, and see that a human
Speaker 1: being was capable of pulling off the world's most ambitious
Speaker 1: DIY of all time, with a degree of difficulty of
Speaker 1: seven thousand out of ten. Doctor Galvin said, quote, we
Speaker 1: were astonished. I couldn't believe someone without anesthesia could operate
Speaker 1: on herself and still be alive. To me, it is incredible.
Speaker 1: And while I'm no medical professional, I concur Doctor Inez
Speaker 1: was admitted to hospitals so they could keep an eye
Speaker 1: on her and watch out for infection, and you know,
Speaker 1: put her on a course of antibiotics and stuff. And
Speaker 1: on the seventh day they discovered that she had a
Speaker 1: secondary bowel obstruction issue resulting from a bit of damage
Speaker 1: to her intestines, so she had a quick second surgery.
Speaker 1: It was repaired and all's good. They also tied her
Speaker 1: tubes while they were in there, too, to prevent any
Speaker 1: further pregnancies. I hope they had her consent before they
Speaker 1: did that. You never know. Innes spent a total of
Speaker 1: ten days in hospital before she and her perfectly healthy
Speaker 1: new baby, Orlando, returned home where she could take care
Speaker 1: of him and her six other children. Hopefully Dad stayed
Speaker 1: away from the canteena for a while. I would have
Speaker 1: milked that shit for years. I'd still be milking it
Speaker 1: now twenty four years later. So how did Innes actually
Speaker 1: survive well? Doctors say that they believed that the fact
Speaker 1: that she got into the squat position played a big
Speaker 1: factor in her and Orlando's survival because it forced her
Speaker 1: uterus to sit forward against her abdominal wall rather than
Speaker 1: her intestines or anything else. But all the other factors
Speaker 1: that really could have ended in disaster, like the risk
Speaker 1: of infection from the very non sterile environment, to the
Speaker 1: fact that she was able to stay conscious during the
Speaker 1: whole thing that she didn't bleed out, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: They are just unexplainable, or are they? Because to Galvin,
Speaker 1: he said that, particularly when it comes to the no
Speaker 1: infection part quote, it may tell us that there are
Speaker 1: populations with an innate resistance so strong that they can
Speaker 1: tolerate what urban groups can't. And I guess that makes sense.
Speaker 1: Like you know how they tell us not to oversanitize
Speaker 1: our homes and stuff because we need exposure to germs
Speaker 1: to build up immunity to them. Same thing, but way
Speaker 1: more impressive. It took four years for the world to
Speaker 1: find out about this story, which they did in two
Speaker 1: thousand and four when a case study about Inez's self
Speaker 1: administered C section by doctor Galvin and doctor Goosman was
Speaker 1: published in the International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics FANCY.
Speaker 1: And even though there are anecdotal accounts of other women
Speaker 1: who have self performed cesarean sections, in two thousand and four,
Speaker 1: Ines Ramirez Perez officially became the first proven documented case
Speaker 1: in history where both mother and baby survived, and the
Speaker 1: article also helped to raise awareness around the very import
Speaker 1: an issue of the lack of medical care faced by
Speaker 1: women living in remote areas. The world was very keen
Speaker 1: to hear from Inez once the story broke. She did
Speaker 1: a few small interviews and seemed pretty chill about the
Speaker 1: whole thing. She said that she used her knowledge of
Speaker 1: butchering animals to sort of guide her incision making decisions,
Speaker 1: But more poignantly, she said quote, I couldn't stand the
Speaker 1: pain anymore. And if my baby was going to die,
Speaker 1: then I decided I would have to die too. But
Speaker 1: if he was going to grow up, I was going
Speaker 1: to see him grow up, and I was going to
Speaker 1: be with my child. I thought God would save both
Speaker 1: our lives. I mean, how good are mums? I bet
Speaker 1: you wondering how they're all doing now? No idea. We
Speaker 1: know Inez would be sixty four and baby Orlando would
Speaker 1: now be twenty four, But that is it. They live
Speaker 1: a long way away, and I'm tipping that they're probably
Speaker 1: not on social media. But the hope is that they're
Speaker 1: all happy and healthy. And I don't know. Reminisce about
Speaker 1: that time that mum cut her stomach open to give
Speaker 1: birth while dad was getting pissed at the CANTEENA who knows,
Speaker 1: you know what this story made me think about though,
Speaker 1: how unbelievably lucky we are to live somewhere we're access
Speaker 1: to a safe place to give birth is just kind
Speaker 1: of expected, and also how fucking incredible the human body is,
Speaker 1: both in the way that it can withstand so much
Speaker 1: and survive, but also how fragile it can be and
Speaker 1: how it can turn on you when you least expect it.
Speaker 1: Ending on a high note, Hanes light bit of shade,
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed that story. I'll try my best
Speaker 1: to leave less of a gap in between this one
Speaker 1: and the next. We'd love for you to leave us
Speaker 1: a rating and a five star review like this one
Speaker 1: from Chlorice seventy two. What a bloody excellent name. Absolutely
Speaker 1: love Mal and Monty. The dynamic between them is amazing
Speaker 1: and I'm always laughing along with them. Mal's memory for
Speaker 1: the past is incredible. She's always pulling out things that
Speaker 1: were under cobwebs in my mind. Love Monte's attitude to life.
Speaker 1: Thanks for the laughs, girls, You're both fantastic, as are you. Clarice,
Speaker 1: Montroon and I will be back together again next week,
Speaker 1: but until then, as always, take care of yourselves. Thank
Speaker 1: you for listening, love,