'I saved babies on the front line - but I lost my own firstborn'

NHS midwife Anna Kent's life was changed by her humanitarian work. Here, the 41-year-old - who lives in Weymouth with daughter Aisha, six - opens up about helping others and suffering her own tragedy

- ANNA KENT

'It's 2007 in South Sudan. A 16-year-old girl named Grace* is whisked to theatre. She has just delivered triplets naturally - something almost unheard of in the UK. Her thin legs stick outwards as I shuffle alongside, my fist in her birth canal to stop her bleeding to death.

An hour later, Grace emerges from surgery after a complete hysterectomy. I watch her walk home in the blistering 50°C heat with a basket of woolly hatted triplets balanced on her head. She'll never bear children again.

I saved Grace and her babies - but I can't save them all.

I remember being a small child in the 1980s and watching in shock as TV footage showed starving Ethiopians. It was the first time I realised how much suffering there was in the world. Then, when I was 18, my brother's girlfriend was murdered. I was a nursing student-young, scared, and traumatised. I hadn't been able to help her, but through nursing I was determined to help other vulnerable women and make a difference.

Eight years later, with a master's degree in nursing and three years of experience as an emergency department nurse at Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham, I flew to conflict-torn South Sudan with the humanitarian medical group Médecins Sans Frontières.

The first patient I saw was a woman with dull and waxy skin, her eyes rolling back in their sockets. Her unborn baby had died and we had to get it out, or she would die too. I never knew whether she survived.

I had a boyfriend back home called Jack. We wanted to build a life together but when I returned, I wasn't the same bright-eyed Anna he'd left at the airport. I had nightmares and flashbacks of dead mums and babies. I was a shell of the old me and the relationship ended. I threw myself into a midwifery course and agreed to travel again. All I knew was that I needed to carry on helping these women.