Uncommon Case

Dr. Clifford Frederick Bramer was receiving patients at the Pueblo (Colo.) Clinic when the nurse announced that a Mrs. Vernon Hawley wanted to see him. Mrs. Hawley was a big woman (220 Ibs.); awkwardly she got ready and lay on the examining table. A large mass protruded from her abdomen and hung down to her thighs. At first Dr. Bramer thought it was a tumor. Then he thought of hernia. Closer examination disclosed the outline of a baby. He asked why she had come to see him, and Izene Hawley calmly replied. "This thing is heavy and I'm past due."

Mrs. Hawley was carrying what seemed to be a normal baby in an abnormal place --outside the abdomen. The fetus had slipped through a weak spot in the abdominal wall, left by an incision made years ago for a gall-bladder operation. Such cases are uncommon, but not unknown. Far more uncommon was the way Mrs. Hawley had carried the baby without medical attention.

The wife of an unemployed carpenter and mother of five children, she became pregnant again last July. For five months, all went well. Then the uterus slipped through the abdominal rupture. Izene Hawley did not go to a doctor and didn't intend to. She cleaned the house, four miles outside Canon City, washed and ironed clothes for two small boys with an affinity for dirt (the older children were away from home), cooked for her husband and fed the chickens.

"For about the last four months," she says, "it kept me kinda pulled down. I didn't feel too healthy. I worried some about it, but not much."

When Izene Hawley figured that she was past due, a friend talked her into visiting the Pueblo Clinic. Dr. Bramer called in other physicians and they decided to do a Caesarean section. But before her appointment for surgery, Mrs. Hawley had cramps, was admitted to Parkview Episcopal Hospital. When Dr. Bramer got to her, the baby's foot had slipped back through the abdominal wall. With surprising ease, the baby's body was massaged out of the uterus, through the incision to a fairly normal delivery. Thelma Jean Hawley weighed 8 Ibs. 7 oz.

Last week, out of the hospital after five days, Mrs. Hawley was "feeling real good."

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