The ah-ha moment(s)

The Amni-Nik® as an idea was a slow process for me. It started in India at Birth Village , a birth center providing the midwifery model of care in Kochi India. A woman came in labor ready to give birth except that her bag was intact providing just enough of a cushion to prevent decent of the fetal head. We waited for the bag to break on its own. This is the midwives way, to wait patiently, also we did not have a hook in our pharmacy. After many hours I decided to improvise and used a large bore hyperdermic needle held VERY carefully between my fingers. The bag broke easily , more easily I noted then with any other device I had ever used for the procedure. The baby boy was born about an hour later.

Next, I told the story in Uganda to a group of students and midwives at Ot Nywal Me Kuc the maternity clinic run by Motherhealth International.. Ilsa, a midwife, immediately pointed out the flaw in the procedure. "What if you dropped the needle!". To be fair I trust my dexterity and I was not recommending this to the group but using it as an example of keeping an open creative mind when finding solutions in resource constrained areas.  Meanwhile the students in chorus all said "never break water". This conversation  led to the idea to create a device that would have a forward facing sharp and would be safe to use for amniotomy.

Drawing from Italy 2013

A few months later I was in Italy. Influenced by the design esthetic there, I came up with a design for such a device. It was beautiful, but like many Italian designed things it did not work. In New York I took out a US patent and founded MaryGold llc with a core group to move the project forward.  Next I went on to Seattle where you can not throw a pine cone without hitting an engineer. It seemed like a good place to buckle down and work on turning this idea into a product.