All 43 Uses
prudent
in
Half the Sky
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- Consider the factors that converged to kill Prudence Lemokouno.†
Chpt 7prudence = good sense and caution
- We found Prudence lying on a bed in the little hospital of Yokadouma, in the wild southeastern corner of Cameroon, in roughly the area where (genetic evidence suggests) AIDS first jumped to humans in the 1920s.†
Chpt 7
- A twenty-four-year-old mother of three children, Prudence was wearing an old, red-checked dress that bulged out hugely at the belly; a sheet covered her lower parts.†
Chpt 7
- Prudence had been living with her family in a village seventy-five miles away, and she had received no prenatal care.†
Chpt 7
- But Prudence's cervix was blocked, and the baby couldn't come out.†
Chpt 7
- After three days of labor, the birth attendant sat on Prudence's stomach and jumped up and down.†
Chpt 7
- That ruptured Prudence's uterus.†
Chpt 7
- The family paid a man with a motorcycle to take Prudence to the hospital.†
Chpt 7
- But he wanted $100 for the surgery, and Prudence's husband and parents said that they could raise only $20.†
Chpt 7 *
- Perhaps he was right, for one of Prudence's cousins had a cell phone.†
Chpt 7
- Prudence Lemokouno in her hospital bed in Cameroon, untreated by the staff (Naka Nathaniel) Dr. Pipi was short and solidly built, with spectacles, a serious and intelligent manner, superb French—and a resentful contempt for local peasants.†
Chpt 7
- He worked diligently, and he was very pleasant to us, but he excoriated the nearby villagers like Prudence who didn't take care of themselves and didn't seek medical attention early enough.†
Chpt 7
- Dr. Pipi gave an intelligent assessment of conditions in the region, and then we stumbled upon Prudence in an unused room in the hospital.†
Chpt 7
- The fetus had died shortly after she arrived at the hospital, and now it was decaying and slowly poisoning Prudence.†
Chpt 7
- "If they had intervened right away, my baby would still be alive," Alain Awona, Prudence's twenty-eight-year-old husband, said angrily as he hovered beside his wife.†
Chpt 7
- Dr. Pipi said that without intervention Prudence had only hours to live, and that he could operate on her if he had the remaining $80.†
Chpt 7
- Then Dr. Pipi said that Prudence was probably anemic and would need a blood transfusion to get her through a C-section.†
Chpt 7
- A nurse consulted Prudence's records and reported back that her blood was type A, Rh positive.†
Chpt 7
- Prudence didn't seem fully aware of what was going on, but her mother had tears of joy streaming down her cheeks.†
Chpt 7
- The family had been sure that Prudence was going to die, and now it suddenly seemed that her life could be saved.†
Chpt 7
- "If you go," he warned bluntly, "Prudence will die.†
Chpt 7
- Then the nurses hooked up the blood units on a drip, and blood from Nick and Naka began coursing into Prudence's bloodstream.†
Chpt 7
- The nurses said that everything was ready for Prudence's surgery, but the hours dragged by and nothing happened.†
Chpt 7
- It appeared that Dr. Pipi and the nurses had decided to teach Alain and Prudence's family a lesson for being uppity.†
Chpt 7
- Prudence will be dead.†
Chpt 7
- It wouldn't be good for Prudence.†
Chpt 7
- Prudence's mother was too angry to speak; her eyes glowed with tears of frustration.†
Chpt 7
- The next morning, Dr. Pipi finally operated, but by then at least three days had elapsed since Prudence had arrived at the hospital, and her abdomen was severely infected.†
Chpt 7
- Prudence remained unconscious, and gradually everybody realized that it wasn't just the anesthesia; she was in a coma.†
Chpt 7
- She was vomiting lightly, and it was left to Prudence's mother to clean it up.†
Chpt 7
- Dr. Pipi's only comments were criticisms of Prudence's family, especially of Alain.†
Chpt 7
- Prudence's stomach ballooned grotesquely, and she was spitting up blood.†
Chpt 7
- Three days after the surgery, Prudence died.†
Chpt 7
- It wasn't only Prudence's ruptured uterus that was responsible for her death.†
Chpt 7
- If villagers were better educated, Prudence would have had a better chance, for several reasons.†
Chpt 7
- So with more education, Prudence would have been less likely to have become pregnant and, if she had become pregnant, would have been more likely to deliver in the hospital.†
Chpt 7
- And if the birth attendant had been better schooled, she would have referred a case of obstructed labor to the hospital—and she certainly would not have sat on Prudence's stomach.†
Chpt 7
- Prudence's family, if educated, would therefore have been better able to afford the $100 for her surgery, and more likely to consider it a wise expense.†
Chpt 7
- If Cameroon had had a better health care structure, the hospital would have operated on Prudence as soon as she arrived.†
Chpt 7
- Any one of these factors might have saved Prudence.†
Chpt 7
- Very often, they also emigrate to Europe or America, amounting to a kind of foreign aid from Africa to the West and leaving women like Prudence without anyone to operate on them.†
Chpt 7
- What was horrifying about Prudence's death was not that the hospital allocated its resources poorly, but that it neglected a human being in its care.†
Chpt 7
- Conversely, Prudence may have died in part because a UNFPA maternal health program in Cameroon didn't have the resources to reach her hospital.†
Chpt 8
Definitions:
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(1)
(prudent) sensible and careful
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(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) Prudence is also a female name.