20/03/2026
There is no heavier burden for a Health practitioner than watching a patient die when you have the cure in your hands. This is the reality of blood transfusion refusal.
I know the belief is tied to the Bible, to Acts 15:20, "Abstain from... blood." And I deeply respect a person's faith. But let me share what we see from our side as practitioners...
We see a young mother. She has a healthy baby, but then she all of a sudden starts to bleed. It's a Postpartum Hemorrhage (PPH), a massive, uncontrolled bleed after birth. We are fighting the clock. We are begging the family as we watch her blood level drop and her eyes get confused. We know we can save her with just 3 Units of Whole blood. But they refuse. So we stand there, hands tied, and watch a new mother leave her baby an orphan.
We see a young man, a father, brought in from a Motorbike Accident. He's bleeding inside. We rush him to theatre. We can stop the bleeding, but he's lost too much. His heart is stopping. We have the blood right there. But his family shows us the card. We lose him. A father who could have been saved, gone.
But the one that breaks us... the one that haunts our careers... is the child.
I have stood by the bed of a 4 year old child with Severe Malaria Complicated by Black water fever with Severe Jaundice. Their blood (hemoglobin) is dangerously low (1.5 g/dl). They are weak, pale, and struggling to breathe. Their little body is suffocating because there are no "trucks" to carry oxygen.
We have a small bag of blood. It is the one thing that will save their life.
But the parents, refuse. They are forced to choose their faith over their child's life, and they choose their faith.
So we give oxygen. We give fluids. We try every other trick we know. But we are watching a child die... from a problem we could have fixed in an hour. As a Practitioner and as a Human, I have no words for this feeling. It is a preventable, agonizing death.
Here is the science we wish we could explain: The command in the Bible was about eating blood, which was a pagan ritual. A blood transfusion is a liquid organ transplant.
When your kidney fails, we give you a new kidney. When your blood (the organ that carries oxygen) fails, we give you new blood. We are not feeding you. We are trying to stop your brain from suffocating.
We will always respect your beliefs. But we haunted by the lives, the mothers, the fathers, the children that we had the power to save, but were not allowed to. It is the heaviest, most painful burden we carry as practitioners.
