The masked man had already cut her chest open when the lights went off, plunging the entire room into darkness.
This was not good. In fact, it was downright dangerous. A power outage is probably the last thing anyone would want to happen midway through surgery, let alone while performing the delicate task of closing a hole inside the heart of a six-year-old girl.
But Dr Godwin Godfrey and his team had come prepared.
"We knew that we always have power cuts in the hospital -- they can happen at any time, even at night -- so we had prepared a back-up manual handle that we could use to run the pump by hand," says Godfrey, who works at the Bugando Medical Center in Mwanza, north Tanzania.
A reliable and constant electricity supply is crucial when performing open heart surgery -- the procedure is done under general anesthesia and requires the use of an electrically powered machine that acts as the patient's heart and lung.Godfrey and his team also knew that it usually takes several seconds for the hospital's back-up generator to kick in after a power failure. Therefore, they'd previously connected the heart-lung and anesthesia machines to an uninterruptible power supply in case of an emergency.
"Even though all the lights in the operating room went off, the machines themselves were still working," recalls the young doctor. "So this was what actually saved us that day."
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