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